


Take the Stage

by Kinvallatas



Category: Dreamcatcher (Korea Band), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers AU, Developing Friendships, Gen, Implied Suayeon towards the end but really not the focus, Light Angst, Some (very) minor cameos from other Kpop groups and stars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-25
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-09-26 07:40:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 41,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20386093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kinvallatas/pseuds/Kinvallatas
Summary: When he'd first proposed the Dreamcatcher Initiative, he thought it would be easy to accomplish. There were heroes all over the world, and surely some of them would be willing to work with him.A soldier. An inventor. A scientist. An alien. And two of his finest agents. Not ideal, but he could manage.The Director would kick himself for those words later.





	1. Beginnings

**Author's Note:**

> This started out as an anti-boredom project, and quickly became more and more fun to actually write.
> 
> Really, considering that at least half of Dreamcatcher enjoys Marvel films, I'm surprised no one's done this already.

The area was a mess of activity. Technicians were frantically packing their gear, agents were milling around trying to get the restless group into some semblance of order, and then there were the few scientists with Sunmi who knew what they were doing. Yoobin watched it all from her spot in the rafters, her sharp eyes missing nothing. It was how she’d gotten her nickname. She’d been observing the proceedings for the last few weeks, and from what she could tell, they hadn’t been able to do much with the Tesseract. There were more questions than answers, that was for sure, and she'd seen no progress at all.

And now, here they were, with the Tesseract surging wildly out of control. She would have ditched it long ago, but the Director’s expression had made it clear that the call wasn't his alone to make. 

“Agent Dami.”

At the sound of his voice, she rappels down from the rafters and slinks over with movements that manage to be both languid and crisp at the same time. “Director Lee.”

“Any changes?”

“None, sir. Not unless you count the people running around getting more and more panicked as time goes on. Even Sunmi doesn’t know how to stop it, and the technicians have been about as useful as headless chickens since the half-hour mark.”

“That one I’ll give you.” Sunmi says, the scientist striding over to join them. “They have been pretty useless so far.” 

She nods to the Director. “I’ve tried shutting off the power, but the Tesseract itself is pure energy. We turn it off, and it turns it on again without missing a beat. Severing the connections might do something, but there’s no guarantee of it, and it lashes out at anyone who tries to get close.”

He pinches the bridge of his nose. “Right. If we can’t stop it, we need to get out of here. We get everyone out, and see if we can’t salvage the Tesseract from the wreckage. It survived an exploding plane taking it to the bottom of the ocean. It’ll probably survive this too.” 

As he says it, the Tesseract ripples and fires a beam of energy. A portal tears its way into the world, appearing in the center of the ring, and a woman bursts out and drops to a knee. Her clothes are vaguely reminiscent of ceremonial robes, her hair lightly frazzled, and as she stands, Yoobin sees the wild look in her eyes.

“My name is Handong,” she declares, blue stars glowing in her eyes as the portal closes behind her. “I come from Asgard, and I am burdened with glorious purpose.”

The Director straightens his coat. “Mind telling us what that glorious purpose is? You’re trespassing on private property.” He says it with the matter-of-fact tone of a man who has seen everything, and the woman grins wildly. “Oh, that’s a simple thing to do. I need that.” she says, pointing at the Tesseract. “My benefactor has a rather driving need for it, you see, and once I get him that, he’ll help me conquer your world.”

“Then we appear to be at an impasse.”

Her eyes flash. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

She moves before any of them can react, striking Sunmi and the scientists around the Tesseract with the strange sceptre she carries. Each of them freeze and shiver before moving to join her side, and Yoobin sees that their eyes have changed to match the manic glow in Handong’s own. In the next instant, Handong lunges for the Director, and Yoobin moves, drawing an arrow and firing in a heartbeat. The woman slaps it aside like nothing, and she knows she won’t have time for another shot, so she throws herself in front of him and catches the sceptre on her bow.

“Run,” she grunts, straining to hold the woman back. Handong is incredibly strong, and she knows she won’t be able to do this for long. Her arms are already quivering, the bow creaking dangerously. She doesn’t have time to think after that, or even to wonder if he’s done what she asked. With a flick of her wrist, Handong sends the other agents after him, and Yoobin takes the chance to disengage and leap away, heading straight for the Tesseract.

She hears gunshots in the corridor, but she doesn’t stop. She can’t beat Handong, but she knows there’s one thing more she can do for Happyface. The Tesseract shimmers brightly as she yanks it from its housing and draws the knife at her side. 

Handong tilts her head curiously. “It would make things a lot easier for both of us if you’d just give me that, you know.”

Yoobin just smiles grimly and raises the knife. 

She rushes forward, and Handong tenses, but she isn’t going for an attack. Her sharp eyes have spotted what the other woman has not; the Director has a gun aimed at Handong's back, having fought off his assailants. But Handong is fast, too fast, and she catches her midway, ignoring the gunshots that the Director pours into her back.. This time, she doesn’t have the strength to fight effectively, and Yoobin struggles as the sceptre inches closer and closer to her chest.

When it makes contact, an ice-cold energy seems to rush through her, and she gasps as she feels her mind slipping away,something cold and slippery and foreign sliding into its place. “Director,” she gasps out, “Eyes—”

She knows no more after that, and Director Joowon Lee watches as one of his best agents drops to a knee and offers the Tesseract to the woman she’s just fought, a blue glow sufficing her eyes. He runs, expecting her to chase him, but Handong doesn’t bother to pursue. He supposes she has what she wants.

He does what he can. He gets into the chopper that brought him there and tries to bury them, but as he sees the truck speeding away, he knows he’s failed.

A hand goes to his comm. “Agent Jun. We have a problem.”

* * *

The gym is normally empty at this hour. It’s three in the morning, an hour at which most people have turned out the lights and gone to bed. Even the overnight staff have packed up and left by now. But today, the gym is not empty, and it echoes with the grunts of its lone occupant.

Minji hits the punching bag, slamming her fists into it with a well-remembered series of blows. It comforts her to do something this simple, this routine. It reminds her of the old days, back when she was just another soldier, laughing and drinking and fighting alongside the Hurricanes. It reminds her of a time that was stolen from her.

On some days, she sleeps fine. But this is not one of them. 

Every time she closes her eyes, she sees their faces. 

_Suzuka. Moa. Yui._

Her eyes blink shut for a second, and she sees the trio fire rounds over her head, cutting down the soldiers trying to flank her. _“Getting sloppy there, Minji!” _they yell, wide grins on their faces as they join her side. She returns the favor moments later, and they keep up the banter all the way to the enemy base. 

She punches the bag harder and harder, her strikes now landing with more force than technique behind them. 

_Hyomin._

The woman was the most experienced member of the group, a seasoned veteran with years of campaigning under her belt. They could always count on her to have their backs. For a moment, she sees gunfire, and the world is ablaze. They’re pinned down, hoping against hope for an extraction. Then they hear a new source of gunfire, see a path open up, and an armored jeep comes roaring through, bearing the allied colours. _“You idiots!” _Hyomin roars. _“You daft, daft idiots. Get in here!”_

Suzuka could never resist getting the last word. _“Come to join the party, boss?”_ she says, climbing in, and Hyomin fixes her with a withering stare even as she raises her pistol and puts a round through an enemy driver’s head. _“Don’t push it, **Su-metal**. You’re already in hot water as it is.” _

That had been one of the less glorious moments in her life. Hyomin had blistered their ears for it afterwards, and rightfully so. Afterwards, though, she’d hugged them tightly, relieved that they were safe. She always made Minji feel safe. She made them all feel safe.

She can feel the blood trickling down her hands now, even through the wraps she wears, but she doesn’t care. 

_Taeyeon._

The redhead had been her mentor, and while they’d taken time to warm up to each other, they’d always had each other’s back. Always. Taeyeon had vouched for her when she’d been trying to enlist, and she’d been there when Minji took the serum. When she’d been captured, Minji had moved heaven and earth to get her back, damn the consequences. That was the day that Captain America became more than just a stage name to the world, and when she’d first gotten her shield.

Hyolyn had been the one to help her.

She owed the woman big-time for that. She remembers begging withher, pleading. She’d never expected the woman to not only listen, but give her the greatest weapon she could offer, and had even flown Minji in herself without care for the risk.

_“I know what’s it’s like,” she’d said. “I’ve done what you’re planning to do for someone. So you get in there, Minji. You get her back. I’ll be here waiting for you when you do.” She quirks a smile. “Just don’t die. I’ll be in enough trouble for this without having to explain why the only living example of the Super Soldier Project is dead and out of reach.”_

Gone now, all of them. It had been decades for them. It had felt like minutes for her. 

Minji feels the chill of the ice in her bones, and slams a spinning roundhouse kick into the punching bag that sends it flying across the room. She pants lightly, shaking her head to clear the visions, and moves to set up another one. She’s just started to punch it when a voice interrupts.

“Late night?” She turns, and sees Director Lee striding up towards her. “You know, at this hour, most people would be resting. Sleeping.”

She doesn’t know much about the man yet, doesn’t have enough to judge his character. She respects him at the very least, and she knows he’s her superior. It doesn’t stop her giving him a humourless grin. “I slept for seventy years, sir. I’ve had my fill of it for the time-being.”

He nods expectantly, and she turns. “Do you have a mission for me, sir?”

“I do.” He hands her a manila folder, and she chuckles. “Trying to get me back out into the world?”

“Trying to save it.” Minji opens the folder, and she freezes at the sight of the blue cube that haunts her nightmares. “MINX’s secret weapon,” she growls. “Where did you find it?”

“Kim Hyo-Jung fished it out of the ocean while we were looking for you. You would have known her better as Hyolyn. She thought what we think about it; the Tesseract could be the key to unlimited sustainable energy. That’s something the world sorely needs.”

Minji takes a deep breath and hands it back to him. “Who took it?”

“She’s called Handong. She’s…not from around here. Alien, and if she’s to be believed, a member of a race we’ve encountered only once before. There’s a lot we’ll have to bring you up to speed on,” he notes, seeing her brow furrow. “That is, if you're in.”

“Why not?” she says, unwrapping the bloodied bandages from her hands. “If nothing else, it’ll give me something to do. Not like much else can surprise me at this point.” The Director gives her a slight smile. “Ten bucks says you’re wrong. The world was a strange place when you were around, Captain, and it’s only gotten stranger with time. There’s a debriefing page waiting for you back at your apartment. It’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

She starts to walk off, and he calls after her. “Captain. You have more first-hand experience with the Tesseract than us. Is there anything you can tell us about it that we should know?”

Minji closes her eyes, remembering shots of blue blazing through the lines, cutting through people around her. She remembers fighting them, knowing that one shot could be the end of her. She remembers the screaming of the people they took, remembers the Red Skull disintegrating in front of her after touching the cube.

“You should have left it in the ocean,” she says, and walks away. 

* * *

There comes a point, Bora decides, where you look back at everything you’ve done in your life, and you start to question just how you got to where you currently are. 

Yes, her past was a bloody, sordid, scarring and altogether unpleasant thing to recall, but she couldn’t change that. She wasn’t even sure that she would change it if she could; she can’t imagine a different life from the one she’s led, even if she does regret parts of it. What she can do, however, is move away from the darker parts of her past, and she'd been doing that ever since she escaped.

Still, Bora did wonder what her life was coming to when she could be captured, tied to a chair, and subjected to an interrogation without the slightest concern in her mind. Admittedly, these people were woefully incompetent about it. They hadn't hit her, hadn’t really threatened her, hadn’t injected her with anything. Hell, they hadn't even tied her up very well.

She’d slipped her bonds about ten minutes ago, and was seriously debating whether it would be worth just beating the hell out of them and interrogating them back at Happyface headquarters. Because even though they were giving her absolutely everything, this was getting dreadfully dull. Bora hated it when things were dull.

“I don’t care how pretty she looks or how helpless she seems! She is a spy! Just get her to talk!” The shouting is so loud she can hear it from where she is, and her would-be interrogator winces painfully. Seems like their boss had finally lost his patience. About time, too.

“Yes sir,” the man grumbles, and storms over to her with a dark look on his face. “Right, you,” he grunts, tipping her chair back until she’s precariously close to falling. 

She doesn't even flinch. She knows he won’t do it, and even if he did, she’s confident she can escape. “Who are you working for? Is it Lermentov? You can tell him that his services are no longer required. We don't need him to move our tanks.”

Bora sighs. Another two pieces of information, and she hadn’t even lifted a finger. 

“Who says I’m working with anyone?” she says playfully. It’s generally a terrible idea to taunt your captor, but really, she's bored, and the situation could use a little push. “Maybe I’m just a girl on my own, out to make a little cash, and—”

The buzzing makes them both turn, and Bora sighs as the sound of her burner phone's bog-standard ringtone plays. She would have changed it if she could, but on the off-chance the mission went bad, the burner phone was a better choice.

The man picks it up curiously and answers. His face starts turning an impressive shade of red after a few seconds, and she wonders what the anger will make him do; there’s a rack of torture tools behind him, after all. Then he turns pale and hands the phone to her quickly. She balances it between her shoulder and ear and listens intently to the device.

“Hello?”

A familiar voice answers. “Bora, good. We need you to come in,” Jun says briskly.

She blinks in disbelief. “Are you kidding me?” she hisses. “I’m working! It took weeks to slip me in here, and this moron’s giving me everything. Everything.”

“I do not _give everything_,” the man protests, and she silences him with a stare. “Hush, you. The adults are talking.” She draws a deep breath. “Look, you can’t pull me out of this right now, I—”

“Bora. Agent Dami's been compromised.” 

The shock never shows on her face, but it registers all the same, and her voice hardens. “Let me put you on hold for a bit.” The phone clatters to the floor, and Jun hears the sound of shouting over the receiver. He winces once or twice as he hears grunts, strikes and the occasional scream of pain. The sound of cracking wood rings out, and then Bora’s voice is talking to him again.

“Tell me everything. Where’s Yoobin now?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have all the details yet, but Yoobin was compromised while guarding the Tesseract. Remember the incident in New Mexico last year, the one with the thunder god? Apparently she has a sister, and her sister’s a bit on the crazy, megalomaniac side. She’s got Yoobin under some kind of mind control alongside a number of others. The Director’s called it in. You get the big guy, and I’ll fill you in on the rest at base.”

Bora winces. “You sure about that? Because after our last meeting, I’m pretty sure Gahyeon trusts me about as far as she could throw me, and I’d rather not test just how far that is.”

“Well, they’ve told me to go and get Siyeon, so…” 

She lets out a cry of indignation. “You get to fetch Singnie? Sometimes you really suck, you know that?”

“Does she know you call her that?” Jun asks amusedly. “Last time I checked, she wasn't too happy with you after last year's neck-stabbing incident.”

“Please,” Bora scoffs. “She’s more than a little pissed at Happyface, sure, but she loves me. I even went over to apologise. She made me pay for lunch. And dinner.” 

Jun laughs at that. “That sounds like her, yeah. Look, Bora, just go and get Gahyeon, and I promise I'll get everything we have on the case.”

“I’m already on my way out. Give Singnie my love, will you?”

“You can tell her in person, I’m not delivering that particular message.” 

She sighs, and he can imagine her rolling her eyes. “You’re no fun at all today.”

“I’ll be fun again when the world isn’t in peril.”

———————————————————————————————————————————

Thousands of miles away, beneath the surface of New York Bay, Siyeon carefully works to remove a section of piping from the connections that run beneath the water’s surface. Her visor and the blue glow of the arc reactor give her more than enough light to work by, and she has it free before long. She pulls out the device and slots it into place, watching carefully as it rotates, expands and locks itself into place with the familiar glow and whine she’s seen a thousand times in testing.

_Good, _she thinks. _Now for the real test._ She engages the suit’s thrusters and feels herself rocket upwards. The waterline approaches rapidly, and she erupts from it in a shower of spray, waving to the nearby liner before pulling a quick turn and banking back towards the city. “Good to go on this end,” she reports, opening a comm line to the Tower. “Rest is up to you.”

Her sister’s smiling face looks back at her. “You’ve disconnected the transmission lines and we’re off the grid?” 

She nods. “If everything works as it should—and I’m pretty sure it will, considering that we’ve run the simulation a million times over, then the Tower’s about to become a beacon of clean, sustainable energy.”

“Assuming the Arc Reactor actually takes over, works, and doesn’t blow out the entire grid?”

Siyeon sighs. “Always need to be the devil’s advocate, don’t you?” Her sister smirks. “I try. Should I hit the button?”

She swings around the corner, sees the Tower as she roars down the street. It’s dark and dim, uncharacteristically so, and she decides she doesn’t like the look of it. “Light her up,” she says, and her sister walks out of view.

The first few sections glow white, and the windows light up in rows as she soars closer, moving faster and faster until the whole building shimmers. Finally, the top floor glows to life, and the three letters that she’d put there on a whim blaze with the electric blue of the Arc Reactor.

Her comm crackles. “Well, we’re not dead, so…how does it look out there?”

Siyeon grins. “Like Christmas, but with more us.”

Some people would call it egotistical, but she rather likes the sight of their family name shining as a beacon over the city. On bad days, it reminds her of her promise, of her duty to protect the people after all the harm she’s caused. But today, it reminds her of all the work they’ve put in, all the time that she and her sister have spent slaving away, and she’s proud to have their accomplishment visible for all to see. She suspects her sister likes it even more than she does.

“Oh, good.” comes the response. “You can show me what it’s like sometime. Now for the actual work,” and Siyeon sighs as her sister’s voice changes into what she’s dubbed ‘business mode’.

“You need to go harder on the public awareness campaign if you want to make this work. There’s a lot of people still sceptical about our change from weapon-making to clean energy, and while this should help, you still need to do some press work to change opinions. I’m in DC tomorrow, I’m working on the zoning for the next three buildings—”

“Unnie, please. We were having a moment there, and you absolutely killed it. We should be celebrating.”

“Handle a few things for me first, and we will,” she retorts, and Siyeon grins as she rockets up the side of the Tower and alights on the top floor with a gentle thud. 

Wolf’s familiar voice sounds in her ear as she starts walking, the disassembly array she’s built into the floor rising up and working to remove the suit. “Madam, I’ve got Agent Jun of Happyface on the line for you.”

“I’m not in,” she declares immediately, straightening her neck to let the array remove it. “I’m actually out, and he knows that.”

“Madam, I’m afraid he’s insisting.”

“Where’s those teeth of yours, Wolf? It’s Happyface. You know we don't like them.” She leaves him with that and steps into the penthouse, the last of the suit vanishing into the array and down to the lab for Wolf to analyse, improve and reassemble.

Her sister is standing in front of the interface, watching the holographs carefully as Siyeon strolls over. “Levels are holding steady….I think.”

“Of course they are. I was directly involved, and you were right there organising it all. One of the many benefits of being us.”

“I don’t know about that…” her sister mutters, waving the holographs away, and Siyeon pulls her aside. “Nonsense. All of this, everything we’ve accomplished…I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“Same to you,” she says, a small smile on her face, and Siyeon feels the mischief in her rising. “Naturally. That being said, between all the engineering, all the heavy lifting-literally, might I add, and all the paperwork involved, I feel like I did most of the legwork this time.”

“And who exactly did most of that paperwork? Who did all the behind-the-scenes organising, the setup, the hours and hours of trips and meetings to handle this?”

“I did,” Siyeon grins. “You handed a lot of it to me. Still, I’m a generous sister, never say otherwise. You can have twelve percent of the credit.” She knows she’s playing with fire, knows she’ll regret saying it later, but right now, the look on her sister’s face makes it all worthwhile.

“Twelve percent?” she says incredulously. “Twelve percent?”

“An argument can be made for fifteen,” Siyeon says; she’s absolutely going to pay for this later, so she may as well ride on and get what she can out of it. “That would be generous as well, especially after that mess with the elevator.”

Her sister arches an eyebrow. “And that was my fault how?” she says, pouring herself a drink and walking towards the glass table. 

“Well, you called in that new workforce, and they filled the place with so much dust and sweat and stink…honestly, that was horrific, I had to get Wolf to sterilise it and everything.” The look she gets for that promises retribution, and Siyeon winces as she plops herself down on the couch beside her sister. “I’m going to pay for that in some small, subtle and painful way later, aren’t I?”

“Not much subtlety about it,” the woman responds, and Siyeon quickly decides that a little bit of grovelling might be in order. “Tell you what, I’ll put your name on the next building.”

“Please, we always put the family name on the buildings, and that’s not going to change. No, you’re putting my name on the lease of the next one, and you’re coming to my next performance.” 

Siyeon pretends to faint and starts fanning herself. “You drive a hard bargain,” she says dramatically, knowing she always tries to attend those performances anyway. She's blown off board meetings more than once for it. “Done.”

“Oh, good,” her sister grins. “Because I have a performance coming up next week that’s going to keep me very, _very_ busy, and that means you get to take care of all this.”

She slides a briefcase from beneath the couch and puts on the table in front of her. “If you’re quick about it, you should be able to finish just in time to come visit me in DC,” she says, and Siyeon groans in dismay as it opens to reveal a myriad of papers filling it to the brim.

“You are an evil, evil woman, and I hate you.”

Her sister blows a raspberry, and then the moment is interrupted by the beep of the telephone. “Madam, the telephone,” Wolf says apologetically. “I’m afraid my protocols are being overridden.”

“Miss Lee, we need to talk,” Jun’s voice says, and Siyeon suppresses a scowl as she picks it up. “You have reached the Life-Model-Decoy of Lee Siyeon,” she says monotonously, ignoring her sister's snickering. “Please leave a message.”

“This is urgent,” he says, and she resists the urge to roll her eyes. “Then leave it urgently.”

The elevator doors open, and Agent Jun steps out, phone pressed to his ear and a thoroughly unimpressed look on his face. “Security breach,” she says pointedly, mentally making a note to improve her protocols and Wolf’s abilities in cybernetic espionage later. “That’s on you, Wolf.”

“Jun,” her sister exclaims happily, and all other thoughts immediately leave Siyeon’s mind as she watches her sister walk over and hug the Agent. “Come in, please! Have a drink.”  


“I can’t stay,” he returns warmly, though he accepts the drink, and Siyeon stares in disbelief. “When did this happen? Because last time I checked, you two barely knew each other, and—”

“We need you to look this over,” Jun says, and holds a black folder out towards her. She almost flinches. “I don’t like being handed things,” she says.

“That's fine,” her sister interjects, “because I love being handed things.” She takes it from him, pulls Siyeon’s drink out of her hands and replaces it gently with the folder. 

Siyeon stares back and forth between it and her sister for several seconds before sighing. “Official consulting hours are between eight and five,” she says, flipping it twice in her hands. It’s surprisingly light. “This isn’t a consultation,” Jun says.

“Then why are you here?” she retorts. “Because last time I checked, I never made it past consultant status with you.”

“Is this about the Dreamcatcher Initiative?” her sister asks, and immediately blinks as all eyes in the room turn to her. “Which I know nothing about,” she adds quickly, and Jun shoots her an unimpressed look as Siyeon sighs, opens the folder and starts assembling the tablet inside.

“The Dreamcatcher Initiative was scrapped,” she says, walking towards the interface. “And I didn’t even qualify.”

“I didn’t know that either.”

“Yeah,” Siyeon continues loudly. “Apparently I was volatile, self-obsessed, didn’t play well with others.” All of them lies or truths so stretched that the slightest application of pressure would break them wide open. She'd been dying, for god's sake. She was still more than a little bitter over the whole affair. 

“That I did know,” her sister says, and the look she gives Jun makes it very clear as to what she thinks of that decision. She’d been thoroughly unimpressed with Happyface’s attempt to get something out of Siyeon when she’d been dying, and much like Siyeon herself, had remained frosty towards them ever since.

Once again, she wondered why her sister and Jun seemed to have bypassed that rule.

“This isn't about personality profiles anymore,” he says, and Siyeon waves him off. “Whatever.” She has no time for his excuses or justifications, and she looks up. “Miss Lee, got a second?”

“I’ll be right back,” her sister tells Jun, and quickly moves over. 

“You know,” Siyeon says, typing away at the tablet, “I thought we were having a lovely, sisterly moment back there.”

“I was having twelve percent of a sisterly moment,” she snarks in return, and then her face changes. “This seems serious, though. Jun’s pretty shaken.” 

“And how would you know?” Siyeon questions, her protective instincts flaring up. “He’s part of Happyface, remember? We don’t trust them. And why is he Jun to you, and not just Agent?”

“What is all this?” her sister asks, attention seemingly focused on the tablet, and Siyeon wants to growl because it’s a poor, poor attempt to avoid answering the question. But her sister is right, sadly. This does look important, and she swallows the anger to respond.

“This…is the Initiative,” she says, and throws out her hands. Holographs appear all around the interface; she sees a blonde summoning lightning, a massive, powerfully built woman with green skin roaring and shrugging off bullets, and a woman frozen in ice with an unmistakable symbol on her chest.

Siyeon’s heart skips a beat, and she ignores the images of herself on the tablet. “Were you ever going to tell me you’d found Captain America?” she asks. “Because I would have liked to know that you’d found the person who my parents lost their lives searching for before today. I feel like I’ve earned that much.”

To his credit, Jun does look abashed at this. “It wasn’t my call. It was from the higher-ups.”

Her sister clutches her arm tightly and gives her a serious look. “I’m taking the jet to DC tomorrow, and I’ll take those papers with me. You have homework to do. A lot of it.”

Siyeon grimaces. “Do you trust them?” she whispers, making sure to hide their lips from view. She’s keenly aware of Jun’s eyes on them, and she'd put a sizeable amount of money on the bet that he knew how to read lips.

“No,” comes the quiet response. “But I trust Jun enough to believe he’s telling the truth here, and if he is, then you’re needed.”

She closes her eyes. “I know. Stay safe, please.” 

“You too,” her sister says, and they share a fierce hug. They wear different faces after they separate. She wears the tensed jaw and the scowl of Iron Maiden, and her sister wears a face of utter professionalism, the businesswoman and secretary feared throughout the industry.

Her sister moves over to Agent Jun, still strikingly familiar with him as they walk towards the elevator, and Siyeon makes a mental note to question her again later before turning back to the holographs. One details a strange, blue cube that seems eerily familiar, and she delves into the files.

* * *

Twenty six hours later, Bora is waiting in a shack, nervously checking and rechecking her gun. There are three squads of Happyface agents hidden around the area, each armed with what should be enough tranquillisers to put down a raging elephant twenty times over. They’ve got prototype Phase 2 weapons if it comes down to it. Bora still doesn’t think it’ll be enough, and she knows the gun in her hands will be little use if the Hulk truly decides to come out.

Not that she thinks Gahyeon will go that far. Still, it helps to calm her nerves.

A few minutes later, one of the agents radios in to tell her that Gahyeon’s arrived. She hears the little girl outside, watches her run in, and directs a few of the agents to help her. A normal person would probably feel some regret at using the girl to draw him in like this, but Bora feels nothing. She did far worse when she was younger, after all.

And besides, the girl genuinely did need help. Just not the kind that Gahyeon could give. The money they were giving her would see both the girl and her family living comfortably for quite some time.

Now for her part. Bora takes a deep breath, schools her features appropriately, and rounds the corner with a red shawl draped over her shoulders. “You know, for a woman who's supposed to be avoiding stress, you picked a hell of a place to settle.

Gahyeon is leaning against a pillar, a resigned look in her eyes. “Avoiding stress isn’t the secret, you know.”

“Then what is it?” 

A thin smile touches the scientist's lips. “That’s for me to know, and you to find out. Hi, Bora. Wish I could say it was good to see you, but…” 

The agent chuckles ruefully, and they both take a seat at the table. “Yeah, I know. Still haven’t forgiven me for last time, have you?”

“Please, I’m not that petty. If it wasn’t for the fact that I’m pretty sure I know why you’re here, I’d almost say it was nice to see you again. I assume those soldiers outside aren’t just for show?”

Bora glances at the window and sees a few dark forms hastily moving back into position. She rolls her eyes. “They were a precautionary measure to pull you away in case you were particularly unhappy to see us,” she says. “But I think we both know they won’t be needed, right?”

Gahyeon purses her lips. “Depends on why you’re here. The girl…was she a spy too?” Bora shakes her head. “No. Just a little girl in desperate need of money to support her family. I did much worse to survive than that.”

A hint of sympathy appears on the scientist's face for a moment, then goes away just as quickly. “How did Happyface find me? I thought I’d covered my tracks pretty well.”

“We never lost you. Harlem was something of a beacon, especially since you left the Abomination alive. We had quite a time trying to keep Ross from using him.”

Gahyeon nods. “I suppose I owe you that much, then. Why wait so long, though? Are you here to kill me? You finally want the Hulk for something?” 

The suspicious stare hurts more than she thought it would. “No,” she says, shaking her head vehemently. “Nothing like that. And I would never agree to it even if it was.” The woman holds the stare, and she stares back unflinchingly. She has nothing to hide, and she’s not lying.

After a few moments, Gahyeon pulls away. “I’m going to trust you on that.” she says, and relaxes ever so slightly. “So why do you need me, then?”

“Orders from above. There was a device Happyface had; the Tesseract. We fished it out of the ocean while searching the depths for Captain America, and we think it holds the key to limitless sustainable energy. There’s one major issue with that; less than twenty four hours ago, it was stolen, and we need your help to find it.”

The scientist blinks. “Didn’t see that coming. What do you think I can do? I’m no tracker.”

“The Tesseract emits low-level gamma radiation, but it's so low that conventional scanners can't pick it up. You’re the best in the world with gamma radiation, and no one knows the field like you.”

“Mhm,” Gahyeon says, leaning back in her chair. “Say I find this for you, then. What happens after that? Happyface takes me in, locks me away?”

“No. You get to walk away free, and we stop tracking you unless the Hulk decides to go on a rampage through a civilian populace.”

The scientist nods, seemingly satisfied with that. Bora doesn’t expect her to slam her hands down on the table and roar “Don’t lie to me!” at the top of her lungs. There’s an anger in her face, and Bora thinks she can see the Hulk in her eyes, waiting to be released.

Her hands twitch, but she forces herself to remain calm. “I’m not lying.” The anger vanishes as quickly as it comes, and Gahyeon is a normal woman again. “I know,” she says calmly. “I just wanted to see what you’d do.”

Bora pouts. “You probably just took years off my life with that stunt!”

Gahyeon gives her a beatific smile. “Consider that payback for what you did to me last time."


	2. Gathering Steam

As the VTOL soars through the air, Minji stares at the files in her hands and tries to make sense of what she’s been given. 

“So, this Doctor Lee,” she begins.

“She prefers Gahyeon, apparently. Only doctor I’ve met who doesn’t like her title.”

“This Gahyeon, then. She was trying to recreate the Super Soldier Serum?”

“A lot of people were, Captain. You were the world’s first superhero.” Minji shakes her head sadly. She feels the need to move, so she stands and walks towards the windows of the cockpit. 

“Not exactly a glorious legacy,” she says ruefully, staring out over the open ocean. “It doesn’t look like things ended well for her.”

Agent Jun winces. “Gahyeon was an….extreme case. Most people just failed outright. You have to understand, Captain…you and the Serum were a pivotal part of saving the world. People wanted that kind of faith again. Someone to believe in.”

“A figurehead, you mean.” The words taste bitter in her mouth.

“I wouldn’t look at it that way. You were a hero to a lot of people, and someone to look to up for a lot of kids out there. Including me,” the agent admits, and Minji blinks at him in surprise. “I used to collect cards of you when I was younger. Some of them are still in mint condition. It’s nice to officially meet you, Captain.” 

She smiles, not quite in the mood for conversation, and shakes his hand.

“You know, I watched you in the ice while you were sleeping.”

Minji blinks, and the agent quickly tries to backpedal. “Not like that! I mean I was present when they woke you from the ice. What I’m trying to say is that it’s an honor, and—” For a moment, she feels the ice around her again, cold and unforgiving and unyielding, and she shivers. Jun seems to realise that she’s not listening, and trails off with a wince. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she says, shaking off the vision. “Just some bad memories. In a way, it’s nice to know that I had that effect on people, I guess. I just hope I’m the right person for the job.”

“You are,” he says firmly. “We’ve got your gear on base as well. We’ve upgraded the suit considerably, modernised it, made it tougher. I had a bit of design input.”

She cocks her head curiously. “That old thing? Aren’t the stars and stripes a tad tacky in this day and age? Never was much for them myself.”

“We could use a bit of old-fashioned, honestly,” he says, looking slightly crestfallen at her admission.

Not long after that, the pilot announces that they’ve arrived, and they touch down on the deck of a military carrier. Minji steps out, sweeping her gaze over the thrum of people running around seeing to their duties. She recognises none of it; she’d never seen action by the sea, but there’s a strange familiarity to their actions. 

“Minji! Good to see you up and about!” a voice calls, and she turns to see a familiar face walking up to her. A smile makes its way onto her face. Kim Bora was one of the first people she’d met after she’d been thawed out of the ice, and she could honestly say the woman was among the few people she’d formed a connection with in this new world she found herself in.

“Good to see you too, Bora. And your friend…Gahyeon, I presume?”

The woman dogging Bora’s footsteps looks slightly different than the one in the files, but she looks close enough for Minji to put two and two together. “Correct,” she says. “I take it they told you about me, then.”

Minji nods. “They told me you’re the woman who can help us find the Tesseract.” Gahyeon raises an eyebrow. “Is that the only thing they told you?”

“It’s the only one I care about,” she says honestly, and sees the woman’s face twist into a small smile. “You, of course, need little introduction. It’s nice to meet you, Captain America.”

“Call me Minji,” she says, and the pair of them smile at each other. 

"Good to see you two getting along," Bora grins. "If this is how you react to Gahyeon, Minji, I can't wait to see what happens when you meet Siyeon."

Minji frowns, the name ringing a bell in her memory. "Siyeon? Hyolyn's daughter, right? The Director's told me a lot about her."

To her surprise, Bora scowls. "Better not to trust too much of what he's told you about her, the two of them don't really get along at all. But she's one of my best friends," she says. "Anyway, we're getting off topic. You two might want to follow me inside. It’s going to get a little hard to breathe out here before long.”

Gahyeon curtsies. “By all means, lead the way to whatever cell you’ve got for me. Was this Happyface’s plan for me, by the way? Keep me in a pressurised, submerged, metal box?” Bora's grin widens. “Oh, we’re not going under,” she says, and as she speaks, the sound of engines start to whir. 

“All personnel, we are now entering flight mode,” a man announces over the speakers. “Report to your stations and prepare for lift-off.” Both Minji and Gahyeon look over the side, and see a massive turbine spinning up, dissipating the water with the force.

They turn back to Bora, and the shock must show on their faces, because if anything, the woman’s smirk has only gotten wider. “As I said, we’re not going under. Come on, let’s get inside before we start losing oxygen.”

“Oh, this is much worse than the alternative,” Gahyeon grimaces.

In the end, they do follow her in, and Bora leads them to a large lift that whirs and starts taking them up. “Welcome to the Helicarrier,” she says. “Not the most creative of names, but it does describe the place pretty well, don’t you think?” The lift stops and she strides out, the other two hastily following her along the winding corridor. “It’s not been up and running for very long, but after the incident with Handong, it’s currently serving as Happyface’s main base of operations.”

“I can see why,” Gahyeon murmurs, no doubt seeing the advantages of a mobile base. “Must be hard to hide this thing, though.”

“Less than you might think. The Helicarrier has a limited form of cloaking that’ll fool most radar and the incautious eye.”

The corridor suddenly widens, and they emerge onto what must be the main deck. Dozens of agents man their stations, delivering reports from around the world with a crisp and practiced efficiency. If Minji cranes her ears, she can just about hear them muttering about searches and a lack of success. The control banks in the front seem to be dedicated to navigation, the crew there keeping the massive base on course.

At the head of all this is Director Joowon Lee, standing at his place atop the bridge. Minji fumbles for her wallet as they approach him, and hands him a slightly crumpled ten-dollar bill. He gives her an amused look, and she shrugs. “I really shouldn’t have made that bet, should I?” she says sheepishly.

He shakes his head. “Like I said, Captain, the world’s full of strange things. Take a seat, if you wouldn’t mind.” He gestures to the large table behind him. They all take their places, and Minji snorts as she sees the styled insignia of Happyface etched into the metal. 

“It’s not the most threatening thing out there, is it?” she whispers. “No, it really isn’t,” Gahyeon whispers back.

The Director coughs pointedly. “If we could get down to business, please?” They straighten up, and Bora shoots him an amused look. “Told you the symbol would get them.” 

He turns a withering stare on her before leaning his hands on the table.

“The situation is as follows: fourty eight hours ago, the Tesseract was stolen by a women who identified herself as Handong of Asgard. As far as we know, she’s the sister of Yoohyeon, a woman of the same race who we ran into last year. Her powerset matches that of the Norse god Thor, Captain,” he adds, noticing the confusion on Minji’s face.

That seems to clear it somewhat, and he continues. “In the process, she also took control of the minds of several agents, including one of my best. We don’t know how she managed it. We just know that it seems to be tied to the sceptre she carries, requires physical contact, and causes the afflicted’s eyes to turn a pale blue.” Bora clenches her fists at this.

“We’ve been scanning for her, the Tesseract and our missing agents, but we’ve had no luck so far. That, Doctor Lee, is where you come in.”

“It’s just Gahyeon,” the woman mutters. “People only call me doctor when they want something.”

The Director ignores her. “What do you need from us to find the Tesseract?”

“What do you have searching for it?” 

“We’re wired into every phone, laptop and pretty much every mobile device on the planet,” Jun says. “Traffic cameras, CCTV, teenage cellphones, you name it. Each of them is scanning for facial recognition within a certain margin of error. We find them, we find the Tesseract.”

Gahyeon is already shaking her head. “Too slow, too random. You’ve got labs out there, right? Call them all, tell them to put their spectroscopes on the roof and calibrate them for gamma rays. If we do a wide-angle sweep, we should be able to pinpoint the location to within a mile’s radius. Could be closer if you happen to have records of the Tesseract’s energy signature.”

The Director blinks. “Agent SuA, would you kindly show the Doctor to her lab?”

Bora stands. “Let’s go, Gahyeon,” she says, pulling the woman up with her. “You’re going to love it. We’ve got all the toys downstairs.”

“Including the anti-Hulk ones?” the scientist snarks, and Bora sighs as they turn the corner. Once they're gone, the Director turns to Jun. “Agent Jun, if you would show the Captain to her suit?”

“Sir,” he says, and Minji’s about to stand and follow him when a ping comes from one of the computers. “Director, we’ve got a hit on Handong!” an agent calls, pointing to his monitor. “She’s in Stuttgart!”

“Not exactly hiding, is she?” Minji mutters. The woman is dressed in a smart black suit, strolling around without a care. “Looks like she’s at a party, and not the fun kind, either.”

The Director raises an eyebrow. “Jun?”

“Got it.” The agent nods. “Come on, Cap. Looks like we have a party to crash, and you need to look the part for it. I think you’ll like your new—well, old, I guess—threads.”

“Now I know why you wear a suit all the time,” Minji jokes, and they share a chuckle as they walk around the corner.

The Director just sighs and puts his head in his hands. “God help me when Lee finally joins this mess.”

* * *

Despite her earlier misgivings, it does feel good to be wearing the colours again. There’s something familiar about it, even though the differences are striking. The star is less prominent, the suit sleeker and sharper than it used to be. It even fits her perfectly, something she’d been fairly surprised about.

“Fits perfectly. How did you know my measurements?” she asks Jun. Her old files, maybe? 

“We had access to your old files, and your measurements were updated after you took the serum.” She nods in understanding. That made sense. “We also…may have measured you a little after the ice. Just in case they’d changed.”

Minji frowns. “I don’t remember that.”

“You…wouldn’t,” Jun winces. “You may have been asleep at the time. In the sense that we hadn't woken you from the ice yet.”

“Naughty, naughty,” Bora calls from the cockpit. “Absolutely scandalous, perving on Minji like that. You should be ashamed of yourself, Jun!”

“It wasn’t like that!” he defends. “It wasn’t just my call, and I wasn’t involved until the en-”

Minji’s expression has been steadily changing throughout the discussion, going from surprised to incredulous to worried. Right now, it is somewhere between dismayed and deadpan, and Jun squirms as he realises this. 

“Unless you do that to all your new agents, I think I feel violated.” she mutters. “Actually, if that’s standard procedure, I might still feel violated.”

“As far as I know, it’s not,” Bora frowns. “Although, now that you mention it, they were a tad grabby when I was being fitted for my uniform…”

It takes them a long time to stop laughing, and Jun’s face is still red by the time they reach Stuttgart. 

When they arrive, Handong’s in full armour, her gilded breastplate and horned helmet clearly visible. She has the crowd bending knee to her with the exception of an elderly man who she seems to be trading words with. They can’t hear what’s being said, not from where they are, but whatever he says seems to incense Handong. She says something, and the eyes of the crowd turn to the old man as she lifts her sceptre.

“She’s going to kill him!” Minji shouts, anxiously watching the situation. 

“Go!” Bora yells, and opens the bay doors as she sends the VTOL diving towards the square.

Minji leaps without thinking, bracing for impact, and hits the ground in front of the old man just in time to block the shot that would have hit him. To her relief, the shield is just as indestructible as she recalls, deflecting the blast as easily it had deflected bullets all those years ago.

_Thank you, Hyolyn,_ she thinks, remembering her old friend, and stands.

“You know, the last time I was in Germany, there was another guy walking around acting like he was better than everyone. He and I ended up disagreeing.”

She can hear the restless crowd, murmurs and whispers of “Captain America” and “impossible” reaching her ears as she moves into a ready stance. “The soldier,” Handong snarls. “The woman out of time.”

“Looks to me like I was right in the nick of time,” she returns, and at that moment, the VTOL swings in and aims its chaingun at Handong. “Handong, stand down and drop your weapon,” Bora says, her voice magnified by the vehicle's loudspeakers.

The Asgardian takes one look at the vehicle before she raises the sceptre, and Bora’s forced to bank dangerously to avoid the blast of blue light that erupts from it. Minji throws the shield, catches the returning weapon as it bounces off Handong’s chest and tackles her in the next second, punching her across the face with a hit that would down most others.

Handong just grins and hits her back, and while Minji catches the first blow on her shield, she can't block the sceptre that  slams into her gut and knocks her away. _Okay_, she thinks, feeling the dull ache even through her suit. _This one might be a problem. _She hurls the shield. The woman deflects it with a swing of her sceptre, and they engage in a brief fistfight before a hit slips past Minji’s guard and she’s forced to the ground. 

_Slow,_ she thinks ruefully. _Too slow._

She’s out of practice, and it shows, but the motions are coming back to her steadily as the fight progresses. “Kneel,” Handong orders, pressing the blunt end of the sceptre to her head, and Minji growls and puts a hand on the weapon.

“Not today!” she yells, and wrenches the woman off balance for a second. It’s enough for her to rise, and she spin-kicks the woman in the well-practiced motion that she’s done a thousand times over with the Hurricanes. This time, it actually makes Handong stagger, and Minji grins. 

Meanwhile, Bora reorients herself. She’d dodged the blast, but the near-miss had sent the VTOL spinning wildly, and she’d taken longer than she liked to bring it back into order. She hated VTOLs. They were too slow and unwieldy for combat, as far as she was concerned, but it was what Happyface had to work with.

“We need to get back in there,” Jun yells, searching for a shot from the back of the craft. Bora nods and swings it back round, spinning up the chaingun in preparation.   


The PA system switches on without warning, and she hears the unmistakable tones of “My Toys” begin to play over the craft’s speakers. Only one person would do this, Bora thinks, and she’s proven right moments later when a familiar voice speaks through her comm.

“Miss me, Agent SuA?” Siyeon says warmly, and Bora sees the familiar streak of the Iron Maiden suit roaring across the sky. “Hope I’m not late to the party.”

“Just in time, Singnie,” she grins. “We’ll catch up later. And it’s Bora to you, you know that!” Siyeon’s chuckle rings through her ears, and the woman herself roars past the VTOL.

On the ground, Minji has managed to recover her shield, adopting a wary and defensive stance against Handong. “A little off your game, solider?” she taunts. 

Minji keeps the smile on her face as she taps her earpiece. “Bora, I could use an assist.”

“Oh, it’s coming,” Bora says, the woman sounding far too cheerful all of a sudden. She barely has time to wonder why when rock music starts to play, and a streak of red and gold roars past her and sends Handong flying with two blasts of light. 

It strikes the ground in a three-point landing, and Minji stares into the glowing eyes of the armoured figure as it rises. “Your move, Dongdong,” Iron Maiden says, and the suit sprouts a series of weapons that she trains on the Asgardian. 

Her previous blast had sent the woman sprawling against the steps of the plaza and knocked the staff out of her hands, but she looks otherwise unharmed. Minji tenses, ready for a fight. But Handong just smiles, and the gold armour fades away as she lifts her hands in surrender.

They keep their weapons trained on her, and she looks at them oddly. “I have surrendered, you know. I’d rather not be shot again.”

“Good call,” Iron Maiden says, and retracts the suit’s weapons. Minji stares at her, stares at the suit that makes the science-fiction of her time seem obsolete and outdated by comparison. She’s seen the files, of course, but seeing it in person is something entirely different.

“Iron Maiden,” she nods, hoping to make a good first impression. The armored helm turns. “Captain. Good to meet you at last.”

Bora’s voice crackles through her earpiece. “While I’d love to watch you and Singnie chat, Minji, the Director will have our heads if we don’t start getting back to base with the prisoner. I'll introduce you to her on the way.”

* * *

Jun thinks it’ll be a ten hour flight to get back to the Helicarrier from where they were, and they settle in for the long haul. Handong is tied to a seat and restrained in metal cuffs, though none of them believe they’ll hold her if it comes to it. Even if she does seem to be napping. 

Still, there’s not much else they can do besides making sure one of them has a weapon trained on her at all times, and they settle in for the long haul. Minji feels restless, rocking lightly on the balls of her feet as she stares at the woman in front of her.

Lee Siyeon.

Minji’s seen the files, knows the woman has a questionable past, full of recklessness and bravado and wanton greed. The Director has warned her that the woman is volatile, self-obsessed and prone to irritating everyone around her. At the same time, she's Hyolyn's daughter, and Bora has warned her that the Director has a bias in regards to her.

The woman was currently having an animated discussion with Bora, and Minji’s never seen the agent quite so perky. “Singnie! You never call, you never visit. I was starting to think you’d forgotten me when you decided to cut off contact with Happyface.”

Siyeon rolls her eyes fondly. “How could I forget such a pretty face? I’ve been busy, Bora. Reinventing theentirety of Lee Industries and revolutionising clean energy isn’t something that happens overnight. I did try to call you, you know, but you change phones every other week.”

“Okay, the burner phones are my fault, but I kept my main cell, you know! You could have dropped a message there!”

“I did. It errored out and told me the number was no longer in service. I assumed you were under deep cover.” 

Bora twists her head around and frowns. “Up until a few weeks ago, I wasn’t. It should have worked, unless…” She looks at Jun. “Did you reset my number when I wasn’t looking?”

The agent blinks. “We had a system breach around that time, and we did a lot of things to tighten security after that. It’s entirely possible your number was reset according to protocol, Agent SuA. Didn’t you get the message from the department about it?”

“No,” Bora grumbles. “I was undercover at the time. I’ll have a bone to pick with them, then.”

“Speaking of bones to pick, Bora, I’ve got a couple for you,” Siyeon interjects. “First things first; why weren’t you the one to come and get me from New York? Happyface knows I don’t like them, and I’m pretty sure the feeling’s mutual for the most part. So why not send the one person there I know I like? Instead, I got this one and had to watch him and my sister being way, way too familiar.” She turns to Jun. “We’ll have words about that later, by the way.”

“Not my choice,” Bora says. “I was in the middle of an interrogation when Jun called me, and he told me he had you handled. I got sent to collect our big, green friend instead.”

Siyeon’s eyes light up. “Lee Gahyeon? I’ve been wanting to meet her for a while, so I suppose that’s one good thing about this whole mess. Now for the second, and the biggest thing.” She steps into the cockpit and gives the agent a baleful look. 

“How long have you known Captain America was alive, and why didn’t you tell me? I’m almost hurt.”

“About a month or so,” Minji offers, and Bora gives her a glare that promises retribution as Siyeon raises an eyebrow. “Look,” the agent winces, “I meant to, I really did. It was a massive secret in Happyface, and you know exactly how much the Director likes you.”

“About as much as he likes this mess, I think.”

“I was going to ignore him and do it anyways, but they sent me on assignment, and well…” Bora makes a vague gesture as she trails off, and Siyeon nods. “I get it. Things happen. But you owe me.”

“Tteokbokki on me after all this is over?” Bora asks hopefully, and the woman grins. “You know me so well. So, Captain,” she says, turning to Minji and taking a seat across from her. “I don’t believe we’ve been formally introduced, though I suspect Happyface has probably told you a lot about me already. Lee Siyeon, but you can just call me Siyeon.”

“Kim Minji,” she returns, extending her palm, and the two shake hands. Siyeon has a firm grip, she notes, though that might just be the suit. “And yes, I did hear a fair bit about you, but I make my own judgements.”

“And what happens to be your judgement on me, then?”

She hums. “I don’t have one yet. I’d need to be around you for longer to make a proper one. I've been told the Director doesn't like you, and the files I've read aren't flattering. But Bora seems to like you, and I know she’s typically a good judge of character, so…”

“Hey! What do you mean ‘typically’? I’m always a good judge of character!” Bora yells from the cockpit, and both of them chuckle at the indignation in her voice.

“I think we’ll get along just fine,” Siyeon says, and claps her on the back. “So—”

The distant rumble startles them out of their seats, and lightning splits the sky in dazzling bolts as thunder cracks once, twice, thrice. “Where’s this storm coming from?” Bora mutters, struggling to keep the VTOL on course as the winds buffet it. “It wasn’t on any of our instruments.”

Minji glances at Handong, and notices the woman is fully awake now, glancing around almost anxiously at the interior of the aircraft. “What’s the matter?” she asks. “Afraid of a little lightning?”

Handong sighs. “I’m not overly fond of what follows.”

Thunder cracks again, louder than ever, and the VTOL shakes as something lands heavily on the roof. Power surges as the bay doors open without warning, and a woman in silver armour drops down onto the ramp. Handong wears a resigned look as she’s torn out of the VTOL, restraints and all, and the newcomer spins a hammer before shooting through the clouds.

“Who the hell was that?” Siyeon asks, reaching for her helmet. “Another Asgardian?”

“Her name's Yoohyeon,” Jun yells. “Happyface ran into her last year in New Mexico. She’s friendly, as far as we know.”

“Didn’t seem particularly friendly to me,” she grunts, and slips the helmet over her head as she strides towards the ramp. “Where are you going?” Minji asks.

“After them, of course.”

“But if she’s a friendly, then—”

“Doesn’t matter. If she frees Handong or kills her, then the Tesseract’s lost to us, and every moment we waste means she gets further away.” The armored faceplate drops, and the resolute look of the Iron Maiden covers her face once more. 

“I’m coming with you,” Minji says firmly. “You’re going to need backup out there.”

The suit stares at her for a moment before nodding and pulling her close. “Hold on tight,” Siyeon warns. “This could get a little bumpy.”

“I’ll catch you on the ground!” Bora yells, and then all Minji knows is the rush of air as Siyeon runs forward and leaps out of the VTOL. For a moment, they do nothing but fall, and she feels the bottom of her stomach drop out. Then the suit’s thrusters kick in with a roar, and Minji covers her face with the shield as they rocket through the cloud layer.

The second they’re gone, Bora closes the bay and starts wheeling the VTOL around, a grim look on her face. “I am never flying one of these things again,” she swears, struggling to keep it on course in the high winds.

“After seeing it for myself, I’m inclined to agree,” Jun grunts. “I’ll see what I can do when we get back. You realise, of course, that the chances of us being able to do anything to help are slim, yes? Asgardians are a lot tougher than us.”

“Maybe. But I’ll be damned if we have to sit here and twiddle our thumbs while they need help.”

* * *

When they break through the cloud layer, the world below is dark, buffeted by the rainstorm that Yoohyeon seems to have summoned. Even with her enhanced vision, Minji can barely see anything, and she’s relieved when Siyeon calls “There!” and indicates a large ridge at the edge of the forest.

As they close in, she sees Yoohyeon closing on Handong, the former’s hammer lifted threateningly. “Looks like we might need to stage an intervention,” Siyeon mutters, and Minji nods in agreement as she shifts her grip on the shield. “She’s supposed to be a friendly, Siyeon, so let’s be careful about this.”

“Alright, alright. I won’t blast her yet.”

Yoohyeon points the hammer at Handong. “You listen well, sister,” she begins, and then both of them hear the noise coming towards them. Siyeon releases Minji partway and tackles Yoohyeon to the ground, skidding a considerable distance along the ridge. Minji rides the momentum out and slams the shield hard into Handong’s face.

The impact sends the Asgardian sprawling, and she looks down at the groaning woman with a small sense of satisfaction. “That felt good.” she says, and turns to Siyeon and Yoohyeon. The latter is struggling to get up, and Siyeon’s having a tough time holding her down.

“Let her go, Siyeon.” The helmeted head turns to look at her. “Are you sure? Because she seems pretty angry, and—”

Yoohyeon roars and knocks the woman away with a swing of her hammer, the suit digging a trench along the ground and falling into the forest. “Do not touch me again,” she growls, spinning the hammer warningly. “This is between me and Handong.”

“And I’m fine with that, but we need her too. You see, she stole the Tesseract from us, and we’d like it back. Once she gives it up, she's all yours.”

The Asgardian’s smile is a bitter one. “While I have no quarrel with your kind, there’s one problem with that. I need the Tesseract to return home, and Handong must face Asgardian justice.”

“We can negotiate around that. They tell me you’re a friendly. Prove it.” 

The whine of the Iron Maiden suit sounds, and Siyeon roars back into view looking little worse for wear, repulsors aimed at Yoohyeon. “Just you try that again,” she grunts. “See how you like it.” For a moment, the Asgardian’s hand twitches, and Minji tenses in case a fight breaks out.

Then Yoohyeon lowers her hammer. “Fine,” she says. “I will accompany you to your leader, and I will speak with them then regarding custody of Handong.”

All three of them glance towards the cliff where Handong was. Much to their surprise, she’s still there, watching from her place on the ground. “What?” she shrugs. “Expected me to run? If you ended up fighting, then I had a brilliant show to watch. If you didn’t, then running would be more trouble than I care to deal with at the moment.”

“We’re okay, Bora,” Minji radios in, and hears the woman sigh. “I just broke through the cloud cover. I'm coming in to pick you up. This stupid VTOL’s so slow…I always miss the fun parts.”

* * *

Happyface agents are waiting for them when they finally touch down on the Helicarrier, and they take Handong into custody. Yoohyeon’s fist clenches briefly as her sister is led away, but she slackens it before long and follows them quietly to the bridge. Minji’s not entirely sure where Siyeon’s gone; the woman had peeled off from them shortly before landing, saying she’d join them soon.

Agent Jun nods a greeting as they arrive on the bridge. “Captain, Agent SuA, Yoohyeon. Please, take a seat. The Director will join us shortly.” Gahyeon’s already there, tapping absently at the tablet in her hands. 

“Where is he?” Minji questions as they take their places.

In response, Jun brings up a display, and they see the Director standing in front of Handong, who has been confined inside a large, steel containment chamber. As they watch, the Director touches a control, and a hatch beneath the cage opens up.

Below is nothing but empty air, and the smirk briefly slips from Handong’s face as she looks down. “You see that? That’s a thirty-thousand foot drop in a steel cage. That’s all you’ll get if you try to escape,” the Director yells over the wind, and seals it back up. “So you might want to start playing nice.”

Handong just shrugs. “I surrendered, didn’t I? I feel like that should be worth something. A little trust, a little goodwill, maybe?”

“You can have all the goodwill you want once you tell me what you’ve done with the Tesseract and my agents.”

She ignores him, strolling curiously around the chamber. “Quite impressive holdings,” she ponders, tapping gently on the reinforced glass. “Not built for me originally, I suspect.”

“Built to hold something a lot stronger than you,” he confirms. Bora looks stricken, and Gahyeon tenses as the Asgardian smirks. “Oh, I’ve heard. The mindless beast that makes play she’s still a woman. Are they watching now?”

She stares straight at the camera until the Director coughs. “You plan on answering me, or should I just drop this cage right now and be done with it?”

Handong laughs. “We both know that as long as I have something you want, you won’t do that. But I have a question of my own for you, Director; how desperate are you, to recruit such lost creatures to face me?”

He stares her down. “You’ve killed my men, taken my agents, stolen a force you can’t possibly hope to control and gone on a little rampage across Europe. You claim you’re a god, declare war on my world, and you kill because you think it’s fun. A little desperation is called for.”

The Asgardian’s smirk returns. “Good. Desperation rather suits your kind. Which reminds me; how does it feel to know you held infinite power in the palm of your hand and never managed to make use of it?” 

The Director raises an eyebrow. “Who says I didn’t?”

“Oh, that’s simple enough. You haven’t done anything yet. You claim to want to use it as a warm light for all mankind, but we both know the truth. And if you did know how to use it, you’d be a god right now. I know the feeling well. I’ve seen the power it can give you, and you don’t have it.”

“Big talk for the woman trapped in a cage,” he drawls, and turns to the agents behind him. “Keep a watchful eye on her,” he orders, and they train their weapons on her as he strides out.

* * *

“While I commend your Director’s efforts, my sister will not be so easily cowed,” Yoohyeon says gravely. “If she does not wish to tell you something, you will never hear a word of it leave her lips.”

“Handong’s going to drag this out for as long as she likes,” Minji agrees. “Yoohyeon, you came here to stop her, right? What’s her plan?”

The blonde stands. “While I do not know why she stole the Tesseract or where she has hidden it, I know this much; Handong means to unleash an army known as the Chitauri. They’re a warlike race of unknown origin; their home planet, if it exists, is not in a location within the Nine Realms. They are fierce fighters and great in number, but lack the intelligence to be a significant threat on their own. Under strong leadership, however, they are formidable, and a sufficiently capable mind could likely subjugate them with ease.”

“Makes sense,” Bora says. “Considering what she’s done to those scientists and our agents, I suspect she wouldn’t have even broken a sweat doing that. Do you know anything about her sceptre?” 

Yoohyeon frowns. “What sceptre? The only time I have ever seen Handong wield such a weapon was in our youth, when she was still new to the ways of magic. It helped her to focus her abilities. She has not used a weapon of its like in centuries, not since she refined her control.”

“When we first encountered your sister, she was carrying a sceptre with a bladed tip and a blue gemstone set into the head. It was able to turn some of our own against us with a single touch, including one of my best friends.”

“My apologies. I do find this curious, however. Handong has always been good at turning her foes against one another; she does bear the title of Liesmith for a reason, after all, but to do so with a touch, and with such an unfamiliar weapon? It does not fit her. If I may, I would like to see this sceptre.”

“Be my guest,” Gahyeon shrugs. “They’re keeping it in my lab, after all.”

“We’ve got another problem, too,” Minji says. “Why did Handong let us take her? We traded hits, sure, but it didn’t feel like we’d beaten her when she surrendered. And she hasn’t even tried to run. Something’s off.” 

The gamma scientist snorts. “I don’t know whether you want to try and figure out her motives. She seems crazier than a bag of cats.”

“Have care how you speak,” Yoohyeon growls. “Handong may be beyond reason at this time, but she is of Asgard. And she is my sister, no matter how much she would like to claim otherwise.” Everyone at the table gives her a look. “She’s killed eighty people in two days,” Bora deadpans. The Asgardian has the decency to wince. “She’s adopted.”

“If we’re throwing around questions, then I have one to share,” Gahyeon says. “Why did she steal the iridium? It’s a rare and oddly specific material, and I can’t think of why she’d need it.”

“It’s a stabilising agent,” a familiar voice interjects, and they turn to see Lee Siyeon walking up to them, Agent Jun nodding a greeting to her. He breaks away from the group and heads towards another corridor as Siyeon reaches the table. 

“Sorry I’m late, had to make sure my armour was somewhere that Happyface couldn’t get their grubby hands near. But I did my reading. The iridium will make sure the portal doesn’t collapse on itself like it did back at Happyface’s old headquarters. It’ll mean the portal can open as wide and stay open as long as Handong wants.”

She strolls towards the post where the Director typically stands, and looks around curiously. “Very nice,” she says appreciatively. “Bet Joowon gets a kick out of standing up here. Maybe he pretends he’s a pirate captain; he’s certainly got the looks for it. None of you think so? None at all?”

A woman that Minji recognises as the Director’s second shakes her head, though a name escapes her for the moment. What was it? Kim? Chan? She hums thoughtfully as she tries to remember. 

The Director chooses that moment to stride in, Agent Jun at his side. “Lee, get your ass off my station,” he barks. “You have a job to do, and distracting my agents isn’t part of it.”

“Your agents are pretty well distracted without me,” she retorts, jabbing a finger at one of them. “That man over there is playing Galaga. He thought we wouldn’t notice, but we did. You’re in for it later, buddy.”

“Lee,” he growls, and Siyeon grins as she pushes herself away from the railing. “As much as I hate to say it, Joowon, you may as well call me Siyeon. Everyone else does, and if you keep calling me Lee you’ll have a dozen heads turning to you every time it happens.”

“_Siyeon_, get back to your job.” he grits out, and Minji blinks in surprise. She'd been warned about the animosity between the pair, but the difference between the Director's usual professionalism and his current anger was striking. “You weren't kidding when you mentioned they didn't get along,” she whispers to Bora. “I’ve never seen him like this before.”

Bora winces and replies in a tone so low that the super soldier has to strain her ears to hear it.“Happyface and Siyeon have quite a chequered past between them. We didn’t make the best first impression on her, especially after Afghanistan, and there were a few other mishaps down the line. There was a pretty bad incident last year that had her cut contact with the agency almost completely. She only forgave me for it recently. I’m almost surprised she agreed to come at all, to be honest.”

The woman in question walks over. “Telling Minji about our history?” she asks conversationally. Bora shrugs unapologetically. “She wanted to know, and I don’t blame her. It’s not every day you see the Director this heated. It’s pretty funny, actually.”

“If you’re quite done gossiping,” the Director snaps, “can we get back to the situation at hand?”

“I was doing that before you interrupted me,” Siyeon says. His face is steadily reddening, and she continues as she decides she's tried his patience enough for the time-being. “Anyway, the iridium’s her stabiliser, and the rest of the raw materials are things that Agent Dami can get her hands on relatively easily. Only exception to that is a power source.”

She puts her hands on the table. “It can’t just be any power source. It has to be one of high energy and high density. Something to kick-start the Tesseract with, give it a little juice.”

“Since when have you been an expert in thermonuclear astrophysics?” the Director’s second asks, curiosity and sarcasm warring in her tone. _Park, _Minji remembers, grinning as the name finally pops into her head. Her name is Park Aeri. 

“Since last night,” Siyeon answers casually. “It was part of the package Jun gave me. All the scientists’ notes and a criminally thin briefing of what they know about the Tesseract. Honestly, Sunmi’s data was the most useful part of it.”

“Sunmi?” Yoohyeon questions. “She’s an astrophysicist,” Gahyeon says. “One of the best in her field.”

“She’s a friend,” the Asgardian says quietly. Her eyes are sharper than before, and her fingers tighten around the hammer she carries. The room seems to darken slightly, the clouds outside turning grey, and Minji feels her chest tighten slightly at the sight.

“You mentioned Handong needs a specific kind of power source,” she asks, hoping to diffuse some of the tension in the room. “How specific are we talking?”

Gahyeon stands up and starts pacing. “Well, she’d have to heat the Tesseract to 120 million degrees Kelvin in order to break through the Coulomb barrier, which is the only way she’d be able to generate an energy spike of sufficient power.”

“Unless,” Siyeon continues, “Sunmi has managed to figure out how to stabilise the quantum tunnelling effect.”

The scientist bites her lip. “Sunmi would certainly be capable of it. If that’s the case, then Handong could theoretically achieve heavy ion fusion at any reactor on the planet.”

“Finally, someone who speaks my language!” Siyeon beams, moving closer towards her. Minji looks back at the others, silently grateful when she sees the same confusion on each of their faces. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Doctor Lee,” the billionaire says. “Your work on anti-electron collisions is unparalleled, and I’m a huge fan of the way you lose control and turn into an enormous green rage monster.”

Both of Gahyeon’s eyebrows raise. “Thanks, I guess?” She’s so stunned that she doesn’t even correct the use of her title, and the Director steps in. 

“Gahyeon is only here to help us track the Tesseract,” he says, glaring pointedly at Siyeon. “I was _hoping_ you might join her.” Siyeon grins at her, and the scientist offers an uncertain smile in return.

A thought occurs to Minji. “You might want to start with that sceptre of hers,” she says. “It might seem magical, but it works an awful lot like the weapons MINX used in my day, and they were powered by the Tesseract as well.” 

The Director nods in acknowledgement. “The Captain makes a fair point. And I’d like to know just how Handong used it to turn five of my agents into her personal flying monkeys.”

Yoohyeon frowns. “Monkeys? I do not understand.”

“I do,” Minji laughs, remembering the old film. She’d watched it a lot with the other Hurricanes, had chatted with the triplets and Taeyeon about it and then joined them in teasing Hyomin for her dislike of the film afterwards. Then she remembers exactly where they are and blushes as she shrinks back into her seat. 

“I understood that,” she says embarrassedly.

“That was adorable,” Bora coos. “Wasn’t that adorable, Singnie?” Hyolyn’s daughter grins at her. “Absolutely. We need to play around with her more, Bora.” Minji's blush intensifies, and the two share a devious look before Siyeon sighs. 

“I suppose we should get to work before Joowon pops a gasket. Shall we play, Doctor?” Gahyeon nods. “This way,” she gestures, and the two sweep out of the room. “Oh, and it’s just Gahyeon. People only call me Doctor when…..”

They trail off after that, and Bora sees some of the tension drain from the Director’s body. “You really can’t stand her, can you?” she asks, more amused by it than anything. “It’s like dealing with all the worst parts of Hyolyn resurrected,” he gripes. “If she wasn’t so important to this operation, I wouldn’t have brought her within a hundred miles of this place. The nerve of her, insulting my agents…” Bora quirks an eye at him, and he glares. “You’re pushing the envelope yourself, Agent SuA.”

To his surprise, she shakes her head. “Not mocking you this time, boss. But you might want to turn around.”

She’s serious, the Director notes, and so he does. He’s just in time to see the agent that Siyeon pointed out hastily fiddling with his screen. Instead, the unmistakable tones of Galaga ring out, and the Director stares at him in disbelief. “Are you kidding me? We are facing a potential world threat, and you’re—Someone get this _motherfucker_ off my bridge!”

Park escorts him out, barely containing her sigh, and the Director makes an audible groan before putting his head in his hands. 

“Be honest with me, Director. Does it annoy you more that we had an idiot like that on the bridge, or that Siyeon wasn’t screwing with you?” His glare is all the confirmation she needs. “Agent SuA, I’d like you to take a crack at Handong. See if you can prise anything out of her.”

“Sir,” she says, throwing him a jaunty salute. Minji stands. “I’m going to head down to the lab.” The Director raises an eyebrow. “No offense, Captain, but your skillset doesn’t translate particularly well to that environment.”

“The idea about the sceptre came from me, didn’t it? Besides, I’d rather be somewhere trying to help than sitting around doing nothing.” He waves her away, and she heads off as well.

Yoohyeon, meanwhile, is leaning heavily on a railing by the side of the bridge, and Agent Jun walks over. “Hey,” he asks. “Are you okay?”

“Just…thinking,” she says. “My people are an advanced civilisation. Many of my kind think themselves above other races, and while I may have agreed with them in my youth, I believe differently now. Nowadays, I believe we should be helping them. But every time I have come here, I have caused harm. And now Handong’s rage has followed me here. She took Sunmi because of me.”

“That might be our fault, if anything,” Jun admits. “We brought her in to work on the Tesseract, and she only agreed because she thought it might help her find a way to bring you back to Earth.”

The Asgardian looks even more stricken at this, and he pats her awkwardly on the shoulder. “We’ll get her back. Siyeon and Gahyeon are working on the sceptre, and they’re probably the smartest people I know.”

“Sorry to interrupt you, Agent Jun, but I need to have a word with our thunder god over here.”

He steps away obligingly, and the Director leans on the railing next to her. “Yoohyeon. The war you’re worried about hasn’t started yet. Do you think you can help us get anything out of Handong?”

She shrugs. “I do not know. Handong seeks more than power. She wishes vengeance upon me, and remaining silent is one way she may choose to spite me, even if she remains a prisoner.” The Director shakes his head. “No. The one thing I am sure of is that she’s not a prisoner. She wants to be here, and I need to figure out why. Agent SuA will do her best, but if she doesn’t manage it, then it’s going to fall on you.”

Yoohyeon lifts her head. “What are you asking me to do?”

“Whatever you’re willing to do. Whatever proves necessary.”

* * *

Down in the lab, Gahyeon waves a scanner over the sceptre. “This thing’s definitely giving off gamma rays,” she notes. “According to Sunmi’s data, the signature’s almost identical to that of the Tesseract. But at this rate, it’ll take weeks to sort through it all.”

“If I bypass their mainframe and connect straight to the home cluster, I should be able to speed this up…” Siyeon enters a few things into the special tablet she’s brought with her, and the Happyface logo is soon replaced with the familiar symbol of Lee Industries. “There we go. Should be running at about 600 teraflops now.”

Gahyeon laughs. “That’ll certainly speed things up. All I packed was a toothbrush.” 

“I always come prepared when Happyface is involved in the mix,” Siyeon says, sidling up to her. “You know, you should come by the Tower sometime. State of the art, all R&D…you’d love it. It’s like Candyland.”

Her smile slips slightly. “Thanks, but the last time I was in New York, I kind of…broke Harlem.”

“Nonsense. Compared to here, it’s a perfectly stress-free environment. No surprises besides the fun ones. Out of curiosity, how opposed are you to being tazed?” she asks, waving around a needle-like device.

“About as much as a normal person would be,” Gahyeon deadpans. “But I’m feeling curious today, so I’ll make you a deal. If you answer a question for me, I’ll let you try it.”

“Shoot.”

“How long have you been following my work?” she asks. “I haven’t published anything in years, what with my…condition and all. Even then, most of my papers were in the field of gamma radiation. The one I did on anti-electron collisions fell quite a ways under the radar, even if it was one of the last ones I published before the incident.”

“You got me.” The look on Siyeon’s face is slightly sheepish. “Back in MIT, I used to read all the reports I could get my hands on. I was perfectly capable of diligence, despite what the tabloids would have you believe. I just got through things quickly. Your paper, however, was one of the few I read that I didn’t actually understand at first, and it took me a day or two to catch up on the science involved. Kept track of your work ever since.”

“You flatter me,” Gahyeon says, a slight blush coating her cheeks. “But thank you. It’s nice to know I was appreciated by some people. One last question, if you don’t mind?”

Siyeon inclines her head. 

“What you said back there….” the woman begins. “About the Hu—about my…other half, let’s say. You didn’t mean that, did you?”

“Of course I did. I never say anything I don’t mean. Unless it’s to tabloids. Or if I’m in a particularly odd mood. Okay, maybe that’s a bit of a lie. But I meant every word I said back there.”

“Why?” Gahyeon presses. “People are scared of me for a reason.”

The woman clicks her tongue, tapping her instrument against the table. “After the incident, I read your files. That much gamma radiation should have killed you. Should have killed anyone, really. But you didn’t die. And every time the Hulk’s been sighted, she’s never been the aggressor. Sure, she’s fought back, but she’s never outright rampaged through a civilian populace for the hell of it.”

“So…What, you think the Hulk is trying to protect me? That she saved my life? That’s certainly a…novel way of putting it,” the scientist chuckles, but there’s deep thought in her tone. “You can hit me with that thing now,” she says. “Could use a little shock to the system after that.”

Minji walks into the lab just in time to see Gahyeon yelp and rub her side as Siyeon pulls the needle-like device away. “Hey!” she yells. “What are you trying to do?”

“Relax, Minji!” Gahyeon says, raising her hands. “It’s fine. I let her do it. Besides, I wouldn’t have come here if I couldn’t handle a little shock like that.”

“Not the point. Why risk everyone like that? You’ve seen what the Hulk can do." Siyeon meets her gaze unflinchingly. “I have. It doesn’t mean I’m afraid of her.” Minji throws her hands in the air and makes a frustrated sound, but Gahyeon just smiles slightly and turns back to studying the sceptre.

“You two…I…just focus on the problem at hand, please,” she sighs. The woman’s gaze suddenly turns sharp. “Oh, I am, trust me. It’s just that my problem might be a little different from yours.”

“And that problem is?”

“Joowon,” Siyeon says simply, and Minji groans. “The Director? Look, I know you two don’t get along, but this is bigger than any grudge match, this is—”

“I know, Minji. I know. Just hear me out for a bit, okay?” The soldier sighs and takes a deep breath before nodding, and Siyeon inclines her head. “Thank you. Here’s my problem; why did Joowon call us in? Why now and not before?”

“He contacted us as soon as he—”

“Did he really, Minji? Do you know that for sure? Because I know how old that brief was when I got it. The Tesseract had been missing for fourty eight hours before he even told us who we were looking for. Even if you account for the time it took to contact us all, that’s still more than twenty-four hours left unaccounted for. What was he doing then? What’s he trying to hide? Back me up, Gahyeon.”

“The sooner I get this work done, the sooner I get to leave and go back to my peace and quiet,” she responds, but both of them can hear the doubt in her voice.

To Siyeon’s surprise, it’s Minji who presses the issue. “Gahyeon, please. If you’ve got something to say about this, then say it. I said I’d listen. I’m listening.”

Gahyeon sighs. “There are things that don’t add up. The time aspect is only part of it. Something Handong said in particular bothers me. Remember her parting jab at the Director? ‘A warm light for all mankind?’ I don’t think that was directed at him. I think it was meant for you, Siyeon. Or more specifically, your Tower.”

“The Tower?” Minji asks. “That massive eyesore—” Siyeon shoots her a wounded look, and she corrects herself. “I mean, that big building in the center of New York? What does that have to do with Handong’s plan?”

Both of them glance at her curiously, and Gahyeon tilts her head in confusion. “Haven’t you been watching the news?”

Minji shakes her head. 

“Just before Happyface called me in,” Siyeon explains, “I was working on disconnecting the Tower from the main grid. Lee Industries is one of the biggest names in clean energy at the moment, and the Tower was going to be the test for our latest prototype. It worked. The Tower will run itself for at least a year, maybe two if I’m lucky. It’s still a prototype, after all. Not quite ready for production.”

“Prototype or not, it’s still an incredibly potent and sustainable source of energy,” Gahyeon says. “Similar to what Happyface claims to want from the Tesseract. So why didn’t the Director call her in sooner?”

The Tesseract could be the key to unlimited sustainable energy. That was what the Director had told her. Minji shifts uncomfortably.

Siyeon hums thoughtfully. “I should probably look into that, now that you mention it. I’ll do it right after my decryption program finishes breaking through all of Happyface's firewalls. Amateur work, really, I’ll be done in an hour or so.”

“I’m sorry, what?” 

“You didn't think I’d play Joowon's game without a few tricks of my own, did you? Wolf has been running it since before I joined you on the bridge. Before long, I’ll know every dirty secret they’ve tried to hide from me.” 

She should be arguing, should be trying to stop them. But the niggling doubt in Minji’s mind stays her hand. “Is this why the Director doesn’t like you, Siyeon?” The woman shakes her head. “Oh, he hated me well before this. This is just me making sure he can’t try to pull the wool over our eyes.”

“He could have a reason for it. Some things are supposed to stay outside of the chain.” It’s a half-hearted defense at best, and everyone knows it.

“Come on, Minji,” Siyeon urges. “Happyface is an intelligence agency, but they’ve left us flying blind. We haven’t been told anything except what Joowon wants us to know. You can’t tell me something doesn’t seem off to you.”

“He always has to hold something over you,” Gahyeon confirms. “You know, when they sent Bora to recruit me, she told me there would be no tricks; just in and out, and that was all she’d been told. She’s been working for him for years; you could say he trusts her by this point. But I don't think she knew about the cage. What does that tell you about him?”

She’s a soldier. Following orders is something she’s used to, something that’s been drilled into her since the first day of boot camp. And yet…it had never stamped out the rebellious spirit within her. She’s deviated from orders before. Deviated from them so much, in fact, that she’d been in danger of being court-marshalled at various points in her life. Saving Taeyeon was one such example.

At the end of the day, Minji has always trusted her gut, and right now, it’s telling her that they’re right, that the Director is hiding something that they need to know.

“Just make sure you find the Tesseract,” she says. “The Director’s not our only problem at the moment.”

“Naturally. We’ve had it running during the entire talk,” Siyeon says, indicating a monitor with a progress bar and a steadily sweeping scan of the planet. Minji musters a smile at that. “Good. How long do you think it’ll take to find the Tesseract?”

“At the rate it’s currently moving at? Twenty, maybe thirty minutes.”

“I’ll meet you back here in fifteen, then.” She heads for the door. “I’ve got some digging of my own to do.”

* * *

Handong’s back is turned to her when she first arrives. In fact, the woman seems fairly distracted, gaze fixed at a certain point on the ceiling, and Bora settles in to wait. She has time, and in this case, she doesn’t want to be the instigator. If Handong believes Bora needs her to talk, then she’ll be able to dictate the conversation. 

It is another few minutes before she sees the Asgardian’s body relax, and then Handong turns around. “Not many people can sneak up on me like that. Consider me impressed.” Bora makes a dismissive gesture. “I wasn’t trying to hide. It’s not especially difficult to sneak up on someone with their back turned to you.”

A chuckle. “True, though I would typically be able to detect an intruder regardless. The fact that I did not find you tells me enough. I must admit, I didn’t expect you this early.”

“Oh? What were you expecting?”

“The usual song and dance,” Handong shrugs. “I stay quiet, your Director sends in people to torture me, try to break me, and when I am teetering on the edge, you would step in as a friend. A spider wrapped in the guise of a soothing balm. You would seem to comfort me, but in reality, you’d be giving me the final push.”

Her fingers twitch. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

“Life is full of disappointments. Now tell me, Agent SuA; why have you come here? Does the Director believe your seductive wiles can make me share my secrets?”

“That can be an option if you’d like,” Bora purrs, and allows herself the slightest hint of satisfaction when the Asgardian shifts minutely. “But I’m not here for that, no. I want to know what you did to Agent Dami.”

“Ah, the archer,” Handong grins. “She was surprisingly annoying to deal with. She’s the reason your Director yet lives, you know. I would have claimed his mind too if she hadn’t stepped in. As for what I’ve done to her…I’d call it expanding the mind. Removing the veil over her eyes.”

Bora steps forward, walking until she’s only a footstep away from the glass. “Let’s assume you manage to escape here,” she says, leaning forward to stare intently at the woman. “You beat us, you take over the Earth, make yourself king or queen of the castle. What happens to her mind after that?”

Handong tilts her head. “Is this love, Agent SuA?”

The agent laughs at the thought. “It certainly sounds that way, doesn’t it? But not, that’s not the case here. Love is for children and the pages of fairytales. I owe her a debt.”

“Go on.”

Bora raises an eyebrow. “Go on with what?”

“Tell me the story,” Handong says, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the chamber. “I’m not going anywhere, and I’ll admit I’m a tad bored in here. Who knows? If your story’s a good one, I might even free your friend.”

She sits, mirroring the Asgardian’s pose. “Well,” she says, shifting to make herself comfortable, “it’s a rather simple story, unfortunately. I wasn’t exactly your ordinary child. I was raised and trained from a young age to have a particular and specific skillset. I didn’t care who I used it for or on; morality wasn’t exactly a priority in my lessons. I was very, very good at them. So good, in fact, that it landed me on the wrong side of Happyface’s radar. They called me the Black Widow.”

Handong snorts. “I see my spider analogy was more apt than intended, then.”

“Yep,” Bora says, popping the last letter of the word. “Anyway, Happyface decided I was too big a threat to leave around. Agent Dami was sent to kill me. She made a different call.”

The woman is silent for a time, and Bora isn’t sure what she makes of it. She certainly doesn’t expect it when Handong starts to chuckle. “A damsel in distress, saved by the actions of a valiant hero. Are you sure this isn’t love, Agent SuA? Because your story sounds awfully like a _fairytale_.”

The last word is snarled, and the Asgardian goes from sitting to standing in an instant, slamming a hand into the glass. “You lie and kill in the service of liars and killers,” she snarls, her expression feral. “You have done so your entire life. Nothing you say can be trusted. And yet,” she ponders, “your words ring true.”

Handong sits back down, the madness gone as suddenly as it had appeared. Bora wonders if Gahyeon’s analogy might have more truth behind it than she thought. That kind of mood switching couldn’t be healthy. She would know.

“Your nature remains telling, though. You would bargain for the life of one woman when the fate of your world hangs in the balance? You truly are a selfish creature, aren’t you?”

Bora shrugs. “Regimes fall every day. Civilisations change with the eras. I’ve learned to live with it. What’s one more to the list?”

“Is that so?” The Asgardian’s eyes glow a vivid blue. “Then I will promise you something, Kim Bora. I will not touch your friend.”

“Thank you,” the agent sighs, and the mad grin returns to Handong’s face. “I will not touch her.” she repeats. “Instead, I will have her hunt you down. If you slay her, her blood is on your hands. If you do not, then I will have her break you in every way she knows, tearing at your deepest, darkest secrets, your most primal fears. I will have her hunt down everyone you care about, starting with the love you claim to lack." 

Bora flinches at that, and the Asgardian's grin widens. "Did you think I wouldn't question your agent thoroughly? She told me _everything_. And when she finishes destroying everything that you are, I will let her wake, and she will have just enough time to realise what’s she’s done before my sceptre pierces her heart.”

The horror on the agent’s face is like honey to her, and Handong savours the expression greedily. “That is my promise to you.” 

Bora shudders and turns away. “You’re a monster,” she chokes out, her voice cracking and breaking on the word. “A monster.”

She’s on the edge, and the Asgardian can’t resist throwing a final push towards her. “No,” she grins. “You brought the monster.” 

It does not have the effect she expects. Instead of crumpling in on herself, the agent’s shoulders straighten, her posture and body language shifting in an instant. “So that’s your play, then.” A hand goes to her ear. “Handong means to unleash the Hulk. Might want to get some eyes on Gahyeon.”

Her voice is calm and smooth, all trace of her previous distress gone, and Bora turns to her and curtsies. “Thank you,” she says, “for your cooperation.” 

Handong shakes her head, a slow smile blooming across her features. “You sly, sly vixen. It has been a long time since someone has managed to outwit me like that. Maybe I’m out of practice. Or maybe you’re just good. I did not expect a human to be the one to break my streak.”

The grin on Bora’s face is the most real expression she’s worn throughout the entire encounter. “We’re just full of surprises. And while the compliment is appreciated, I’m more of an elephant girl, really. Didn't Dami tell you that?”

* * *

The Director didn’t think his mood could get any worse than it already was, but they lived in strange times, as he’d told the Captain.

He’d already been on his way to the lab to check on their progress with the Tesseract when Bora’s message had reached him. Park’s communication about a virus and a security breach had only quickened his pace further, and it’s not long before he’s standing outside the lab door.

“Lee!” he barks, striding into the room. “Care to explain yourself before I have you thrown off the ship? You’re supposed to be locating the Tesseract.”

Both of them had looked up when he’d spoken, but it’s Gahyeon who answers him. “We are. The program’s been sweeping for a while now, searching for traces of the Tesseract and the energy from Handong’s sceptre. Once it completes, we’ll be able to narrow the location to within a half-mile radius.”

“So while that’s ticking, we’ve got plenty of time for some Q&A,” Siyeon quips, tapping away at the tablet in her hands and frowning at the files it brings up. “What is Phase 2?” 

The door opens before he can answer, and Minji storms in. “Phase 2 is Happyface using the Tesseract to make weapons,” she says darkly, throwing a familiar-looking assault rifle onto the table. Siyeon raises an eyebrow. “Is that..”

“One of MINX’s old weapons, yeah. There are crates and crates of them hidden away onboard.”

“Captain, it’s not what you think.” the Director begins. “Happyface collected everything related to the Tesseract for study after—”

“Ahem,” Siyeon coughs. “I’m sorry, Joowon, what were you lying?” she says, tilting her screen to reveal files on prototype rifles and extended theories on using the Tesseract to power ballistic missiles.

“I was wrong, Director,” Minji glares. “The world’s the same place it always was.”

The door hisses open again, and Bora and Yoohyeon stride into the room, the former sighing in relief when she sees Gahyeon. “Good, you’re here, and whoa…” she says, looking at the standoff in the room. “What’s going on?” 

Siyeon taps her tablet, Minji lifts the rifle pointedly, and the Director groans. “Agent SuA, I don’t suppose I could convince you to remove Gahyeon from the situation before it degrades further?”

“Not a chance,” the scientist snorts. “I’d like to know why Happyface is using the Tesseract to build weapons.” 

Bora doesn’t move from her spot, and the Director sighs. “Because of her,” he says, pointing towards Yoohyeon. “Me?” she blinks, tapping her chest.

“Yes, you,” he glares. “Last year, Earth bore witness to you and your kind descending from the heavens for a visit, and the grudge match you had in New Mexico levelled a small town. It was a one-two punch for us; we learned that we weren’t alone, and that we were hopelessly and hilariously outgunned.”

“My kind want nothing but peace with your people,” Yoohyeon protests.

His glare intensifies. “You sure about that? Because I remember you telling me that there are people among your kind who think differently, and now we have another Asgardian looking to declare war on us. Besides, you’re not the only race out there. There will be other threats, and Happyface needs to stand ready.”

The blonde Asgardian growls. “Do you know how I and Handong were drawn to Earth, Director? Every time you attempted to use the Tesseract’s power, we could detect it. It was like a beacon to us, to all the Nine Realms. It was a signal that your world was preparing for a higher form of war.”

“All the more reason to have a response ready for when someone less friendly comes along,” he returns, and Siyeon scoffs. “Right. Because a nuclear deterrent is always the best solution.”

The Director rounds on her. “Remind me again how you made your fortune, Lee? Tell me, do they still call you the Bloody Ocean of Daegu when you go to parties?” Fury blazes in her eyes, and he knows he’s struck a nerve. “You—”

“I had thought your race more advanced than this. I see now that you are sorely lacking in other departments,” Yoohyeon says, and he finds a new target. “Excuse me, did we come to your planet and start making war?”

Gahyeon shakes her head. “I don’t know what you were thinking when you brought us all in, Director, but you made the wrong move. You lied to us all, and for what? To make sure we’d be at your beck and call? No, that’s not how things work. That kind of situation is a timebomb waiting to blow.” 

The scientist looks calm, but there’s an underlying rage in her tone. “I was out. I was free, I was helping people. And then you dragged me back into this mess. I should never have believed Bora when she said there were no strings attached.”

Hurt flashes in the agent’s eyes. “Gahyeon, I wasn’t lying to you, I promise. I didn’t know about the cage.” Gahyeon offers her a tight smile. “I know. But I should have known the Director wouldn’t tell you everything. Probably thought you were too close to me to be trusted.”

Bora bites her lip. “Maybe. Look, Gahyeon, we need to get you somewhere safe. I was down in the chamber, trying to get something out of Handong, and while I didn’t get much, she let something slip. She wants to get the Hulk to rampage through the Helicarrier.”

“And where exactly would I go? My room’s been rented out.”

She winces, and the Director takes over. “It wasn’t personal, Doctor. The cage was just—”

“In case you needed to kill me, right? Right? Right? Save it, Director. You’ve lied to us quite enough. And in any case, your plan wouldn’t have worked. You can’t kill me. I would know. I’ve tried.” 

All eyes in the room flick to Gahyeon. 

“I got low. I didn’t see an end, or at least, not one that was worth living for. So I made my preparations, said my goodbyes, and went to find a good place to die. I found it at the top of a mountain in Alaska. But when I put the bullet in my head, the Hulk spit it right back out.” The woman’s gaze is dangerously dark, and an emerald glint shines deep within her irises. 

“Doctor Lee,” the Director says, a hand dropping to his side. “You need to calm down.”

“No reason she can’t let off a little steam,” Siyeon shrugs. “I tested it earlier, she’s got a pretty good handle on things.”

It’s not the Director who blows up at her. It’s Minji. “Is everything just a joke to you?!” she demands, slamming her hands on the desk. “You know the stakes! You’ve seen the footage of the Hulk. The lives of the people on this ship aren’t something you play with like that.” 

She shakes her head, the faces of the Hurricanes swimming before her. “I’m starting to see why the Director dislikes you so much. Hyolyn would be rolling in her grave if she could see you now.”

Something flashes in Siyeon's eyes, and the fury blazing within them melts away. In its place is something colder and darker, and she stares at Minji with dead eyes. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” she says quietly. 

“Everyone, shut up!” Bora yells. “This is Handong's play! She wants us to fight, wants us to turn on each other until there’s nothing left to stop her! And I can prove it, too. Gahyeon? Would you mind dropping the sceptre?”

Gahyeon blinks, and lifts her left hand. Handong’s sceptre is clutched tightly within it, and everyone in the room stares at it incredulously. There’s a compartment in the table, and she hastily places the sceptre within it and shuts the lid on its blue glow.

The difference is immediate; it feels like an invisible weight’s been lifted from their minds, even if they hadn’t noticed it in the first place. The tension in the room remains, however, and the Director grimaces. “She played us like fools. I’ve just spent the last few minutes making an ass of myself, haven’t I?”

“Not as much as I have,” Minji winces. “Look, Siyeon, I—” 

“Save it,” the woman mutters, her voice like ice. “I’m done talking to you.”

The monitor beeps, and Gahyeon moves over to it. “We’ve got a hit on…Handong’s agents, apparently. Looks like they’re right about…no, that can’t be right. It says they’re right on top of us.”

The Director’s eye widens. “Move!”

In the next second, an explosion rocks the Helicarrier, and the lab floor erupts with tremendous force as the heat of the blast reaches its vents. Yoohyeon dives, shielding the Director with her body, but the rest of them are blown away by the force. Minji’s head cracks painfully against the wall, and her vision blacks out.

She gropes blindly for a second until her hand finds something solid and she pulls herself upright, blinking dark spots from her eyes. The lab is a mess, metal panels strewn about the floor and the windows shattered into a thousand tiny fragments.

Siyeon isn’t far from her, having been thrown against the door. “You alright?” Minji asks quickly, pulling her upright. “Yeah,” the woman grunts in response, rubbing her head and rolling her shoulder. “Just sore, and I’m probably going to have a killer headache before long.”

They run for the hallway at the same time, splitting off to find their respective gear. 

Yoohyeon kicks away the debris covering her and rises. Her armour is slightly scorched from the blast, but she seems otherwise unharmed, and the Director presses a hand to his ear as he struggles to his feet. “Park!”

“External detonation!” she reports, and he hears her talking to someone on the other side. “Engine number three was downed by the blast. Technicians say that the turbine looks mostly intact, but it’s impossible to get someone out there to repair it while we’re in the air!”

“If we lose one more engine, that won’t be a problem anymore,” he grunts. “Siyeon, did you get that?”

“I’m on it,” she says tersely. _So she’s in our comms too, _Joowon thinks, and for the first time, he’s glad that the woman’s virus had been so thorough. “I’ll back her up!” Minji yells moments later, and he approves the order immediately. 

“This attack is Handong’s doing,” Yoohyeon says. “I will ensure she does not leave her confinement.” The Asgardian sweeps from the room without another word, and the Director soon follows, barking orders into his comm. “Initiate defensive lockdown, and make sure people get to the Armory! Agent SuA, status report!”

“We’re okay,” Bora says, grateful that her comm is still functioning. “The blast knocked me and Gahyeon down to the lower level, but we’re okay. I’m a little stuck at the moment, though,” she grunts, tugging at her trapped leg. “There’s some debris pinning us down.”

“Hang tight and protect the Doctor,” he orders. “I’ll get you help as soon as I can.”

“I copy.” Her comm goes silent, and she lets herself grunt, the throbbing in her right leg becoming more and more apparent. Bora tugs at her trapped limb again, and manages to move it a little before the pain becomes too much. “At least we’re okay,” she pants.

“Okay…might…be a strong word,” Gahyeon grits out. She’s mostly unharmed, but a number of lacerations mark her skin where the glass has buried itself deep. Those wounds seem to be healing, however, and Bora swears loudly as she sees the hint of green to the scientist’s skin.

“Gahyeon, you’ve got to fight it. This is just what Handong wants,” she pleads, tugging at the debris pinning her down. “Trying,” the woman grunts, pain clear in her voice. She seems bigger than before, her shirt a little more strained than it was, and when she slams a hand into the floor, it dents beneath her.

“We’re going to be okay,” Bora continues. She sees a few agents running their way, and waves them away urgently. “Once this is over, I’ll get you out of this, I swear. I’ll make sure Happyface never bothers you again, even if I have to go through the Director mysel—”

The agents are getting closer, and she sees the glint of blue in their eyes. “No, no, no,” she mutters, tugging at her trapped leg with renewed strength. She’s making progress, but far too slowly, and they’re close, too close, bringing their rifles up.

She twists awkwardly to reach for her guns, but the first shots have already been fired, and she braces for pain that doesn’t come. Gahyeon is crouching in front of her, blocking the shots with her own body. 

“Run, Bora,” the scientist growls, her voice deepening by the second, and she roars in pain as she starts to change. Her body swells to more than twice her normal size, muscles rippling and growing and tearing her garments until only the barest strands protect her modesty. Her skin turns green, bullets pinging off it uselessly.

Desperation lends Bora strength, and she manages to pull her leg free just as the Hulk roars her fury to the sky and turns her attention on the shooters. She doesn’t stay around to watch the fireworks. She runs, just like Gahyeon’s told her, and ignores the screaming behind her as the gunmen mount a futile defense.

Inside her cell, Handong hears the distinctive roar, and a grin stretches across her face.

* * *

“Bring the Helicarrier about! Take us to the water!” the Director barks, rushing onto the bridge. “Navigation’s still recalibrating after we lost the engine, sir,” an agent reports. “Our instruments are down.”

“Is the sun coming up?” he demands. The agent nods. “Yes, but..”

“Then put it on the left! One more turbine goes down, and we drop! Get us over water before that happens, or we’re about to find out what it feels like to be a human pancake!”

Several decks away, Minji rushes forward, pushing panicked agents out of her way. “Engine three, engine three,” she mutters, and prays she's remembered the right one. She forces the metal door open, and the twisted wreckage that greets her outside tells her she’s in the right place. 

“Siyeon, I’m here!” she yells. “Siyeon!”

“Good,” comes the response, and the Iron Maiden suit flies into view. “Let’s see what we’ve got.” She hovers in front of the turbine, her scanners quickly picking up the extent of the damage and highlighting the main points of interest. “I need to get this superconducting cooling system back online before I can access the rotors and work on dislodging the debris. Captain,” she points, “I need you to get to that control panel and tell me which relays are in overload position.”

Gone is the earlier joking. The woman is all serious now, and Minji nods. “Got it.” She starts making her way across the precarious bridges that run along her side of the engine, and sees Siyeon pull away a large chunk of the debris from a section of the turbine before flying inside.

The bridge between her and the panel is damaged, gaps and holes marring the structure, and after a moment’s consideration, she leaps across. “Talk to me, Captain,” Siyeon’s voice sounds in her ear. “What’ve we got?”

Minji opens the control panel, and stares helplessly at the mess of wires within. “It seems to run on some kind of electricity,” she says lamely, and Siyeon sighs as she makes her way through the coolant system. “Well, you’re not wrong. Tell me what you’re looking at, and I’ll walk you through it.”

Thankfully, the system she describes is a basic one, and Minji proves to be a quick study. Siyeon reaches the end of the coolant system just as the soldier informs her that the relays are intact, and kicks a final piece of wreckage out of her way. 

“Damn,” she mutters, inspecting the turbine. “Even if I clear the rotors, this thing’s not going to start again without a jump. I’m going to have to get in there and push.”

“What?! But if that thing gets up to speed, you’ll be shredded!”

“There’s a stator control unit by you. That should be able to temporarily disengage maglev and give me enough time to get out.” Minji’s exasperated growl sounds in her ear. “In words I can understand, please?”

“It’s a red lever. Hit it when I tell you to.”

* * *

“The Hulk’s tearing a swathe through the lower levels, sir!” Park yells. “We need to get them evacuated as soon as we can, and—” An unmistakable tinkle hits the ground, and her eyes spot the spherical object instantly. “Grenade!” 

She tackles another agent away, and the blast blows them both over the railings and into the control banks. A squad of armed men rush in and start firing, forcing the crew to scatter for cover.

Hidden in a corner, the Director checks his pistol and waits for his chance. When the last of them comes through, he steps out of cover and wraps an arm around the man’s throat, putting him down with a bullet to the head. The man’s body gives him enough cover to duel and take out another three before the armour starts to give, and he abandons it without warning, emptying the rest of his clip into the last two.

A gunshot rings out behind him as he’s reloading, and he whirls, pistol in hand and ready for the pain to hit.

Instead, he sees another assailant fall to the ground with a bullet in their head, and he turns to see Park with her gun in hand. The woman is bleeding freely from a gash above her right eye, but she nods at him firmly, and he returns the gesture. Between the two of them, they put down enough suppressing fire to keep any further attackers down and or out, and he frowns as he pops another one.

“They are not getting through here, so what is their—”

He hears the distinctive sound of a bow’s release, and several of the crew scream and dive for cover as an explosion rocks the bridge. His eye tracks the shot, and he fires at the exposed vent that runs above the control banks. Yoobin gets off one more shot, and he briefly catches sight of her blue eyes before she retreats from the gunshots.

“Sir, engine one is going into shutdown!” an agent reports, dragging himself upright, and the Director curses. “It’s Dami. She’s hacked our systems.”

Another report reaches his ears, alongside the sounds of gunfire. “Agent Dami is by us! She’s headed for the Detention levels. We think she means to free Handong, so we’re trying to waylay her, but we won’t be able to do it for long. Does anybody copy?”

The comm crackles, and an unmistakable voice rings over the line. “This is Agent SuA,” Bora says, the icy tone of the Black Widow leaking through. “I copy. I’m making my way there now.”

“Intercept her, Agent SuA,” he orders. “We can’t let her free Handong.”

Her comm clicks by way of response, and he turns his attention back to the situation on the bridge. “Altitude is at 18000 feet and dropping rapidly, sir,” his agents report, furiously working at their control banks. “We’re trying to steer the descent towards the ocean, but it’s not looking good.”

“Siyeon, we’re losing altitude! What’s your status?” he barks. “Noticed,” she grunts briefly, and then only silence answers him. “Siyeon! Siyeon! If you don’t get that turbine up and running, we’re all about to be a whole lot flatter.”

He tries Minji’s comm, but it doesn’t respond either, and he clenches his fists around the railing. There is nothing more he can do but try to keep order and hope that they can fix the crippled Helicarrier in time.

_Damn it, _he thinks, directing a few jets to draw the Hulk away as reports of her raging through the lower decks continue to reach his ears. _What the hell’s keeping those two?_

* * *

Minji hears the gunfire, sees some of the pilots drop and instinctively knows that the black-suited group who makes their way onto the bridges are hostiles. She’s proven right seconds later when the leader primes and throws a grenade, aiming for the damaged turbine.

They haven’t noticed her yet, and she moves on instinct, leaping towards them and slapping the grenade away as she falls.

It detonates harmlessly below the Helicarrier, and she slams into them, throwing a punch into the leader’s face and hurling him off the side. He screams as he falls, and she repeats the process twice more before they gather their wits and start shooting at her.

She blocks the barrage on the shield and throws it, takes another one out. It buries itself in the wall on the way back to her, however, and she curses, grabbing a fallen rifle and rushing for cover as the remaining two open fire.

Meanwhile, Siyeon carefully works to remove the debris, using the lasers she’s built into the gauntlets as needed. She ejects a spent cell, moves forward and kills her jets, letting the suit’s full weight slam into the blade that’s jamming the mechanism. 

It gives way along the lines she's cut, falling into open air, and she stabilises in the next second before putting herself behind the rotors. She’s barely started to push when she feels them start to drop, and Joowon’s voice barks through her comm. “Siyeon, we’re losing altitude!”

“Noticed,” she grunts, and mutes him as she takes a deep breath. “Here goes nothing,” she mutters, and puts a burst of energy into her thrusters.

Slowly, but surely, the rotors start to turn, moving faster and faster as she builds up speed. The Helicarrier shudders as it starts to level out, and she puts more power into it. “Come on, come on…” The low hum of the backup system kicking in tells her that her job’s done, and she releases her grip on the rotors. 

They continue to spin, their speed steadily increasing, and she knows she won’t be able to keep pace for very long. “Cap, hit the lever,” she calls. 

“A little busy right now!” Minji yells, firing back at her attackers. She hasn’t used a gun in forever, and while she can lay down suppressive shots, her aim’s off. 

“Lever!” This time, Minji doesn’t answer her, but Siyeon hears the gunfire in the background and curses as the centrifugal force of the rotor starts catching up to her. Her back hits a rotor blade. “This is going to suck,” she groans. In the next instant, the rotor sucks her under, and she’s battered back and forth between the blades.

She’d have been mincemeat in seconds without the suit, but she knows it can’t take this much punishment for long. Her suits tended to be built for speed and power moreso than durability, and the Mark VI was no exception; she knows she’ll be sporting a _lot_ of bruises later. The Mark VII would hopefully fix that issue, combining the three qualities, but it was still in the testing phase. “Lever!” she yells. “Cap!”

Minji hears her yell, hears the clattering of metal over the comm, and swears to herself. Her stolen gun runs dry, and she throws the useless weapon aside. In the brief second where they have to reload, she leaps back across the gap and throws the lever.

The rotors slow for a second, and Siyeon slips through the gap, frantically engaging her thrusters. To her relief, they activate, sputtering their way into life, and she halts her descent just before she can plunge through the clouds. Damage reports scroll through her HUD, her repulsors already starting to fail, but she ignores them, flying straight towards the hole where she knows Minji is.

Unarmed and with nowhere to go, Minji does her best to take cover against the two gunmen. She takes a step back as bullets spray around her feet, and the floor suddenly gives way. She snatches at a hanging cable and prays it’ll hold as she dangles over thin air, struggling to pull herself back to safer ground as bullets whiz uncomfortably close to her.

A faint roar sounds above the howling wind, and a battered-looking Iron Maiden comes soaring towards her with an outstretched hand. She takes it, and Siyeon moves to shield her as she sends them rushing forwards. Even in its damaged state, bullets ping uselessly off the suit, and they careen into the gunmen as her thrusters finally give out. 

Minji lets go and tumbles to the side before they hit the wall, adrenaline surging through her blood in case the pair get back up. They don’t, and after a few seconds, the fight starts to drain out of her.

“Thanks,” she mutters, letting herself drop to the ground beside Siyeon, who has managed to roll over. “You’re welcome,” Siyeon says, and the lights of her suit choose that moment to flicker and die. “I may need a hand.”

* * *

Bora waits, knowing Yoobin will come.

They both know the Helicarrier like the back of their hands, know the fastest and most concealed ways through its winding corridors and narrow pipes. They’ve danced this dance before, trained together throughout the many years they’ve been partners in the field. They’ve always been evenly matched, though with the obvious disadvantages at range and close-quarters respectively. The only difference this time is that one of them is willing to kill.

Bora intercepts her in the maintenance tunnel. She hears the familiar footsteps, catches sight of the bow, and when Yoobin runs past, she rolls out from her hiding spot between the pipes and sweeps the woman’s legs out from under her.

Yoobin grunts, throwing out a hand to block her fall. Iridescent blue eyes stare at Bora, a far cry from the hazel eyes she’s so used to, and her friend snarls at her. Her bow isn’t as much of a factor at this range, thankfully, and Bora slips away as the woman tries to shoot her, going under and around and flipping herself onto the walkway.

She can’t use her pistols, can’t use her stingers, can’t do anything that could kill or cause permanent harm. Yoobin has no such compunctions, firing another arrow, and Bora skids across the ground to avoid it, burying her fist in Yoobin’s gut. 

Her friend grunts, and she rips the bow out of her hands, tossing it as far as she can. Yoobin just charges, withdrawing the long knife she favours in close quarters.

They wrestle for control of the weapon, jabbing and kicking and scraping at each other. Bora gets in several quick hits, dodging and weaving and trying to get Yoobin in a lock that’ll let her end the fight. At the same time, the long blade keeps her at a distance, punishing her with cuts for every failed attempt.

They’re matched blow for blow, and then Yoobin ducks her kick and slams a vicious elbow into Bora’s side. She feels something crack, falters for a second, and Yoobin takes control of the fight, bearing down on her and throwing her entire weight behind the blade.

Bora grimaces; Yoobin is slightly stronger than her, and she doesn’t have the leverage to stop the blade from inching towards her neck. She sinks her teeth into Yoobin’s exposed arm, careful not to tear the tendons in the wrist, and her friend howls in pain, letting up on the pressure for a second.

It’s all she needs to slip out of the hold and get the archer in a lock of her own. She twists, putting all the force she can into a reversal, and swings Yoobin against the railings. Her head hits the metal barrier with a resounding clang, and the woman groans and slumps against the railings. 

She’s down, but not out, and Bora tenses, ready for anything.

“Bora?” Yoobin says weakly, and Bora sees the blue receding from her eyes. “Sorry for this,” she says, and punches her hard across the face. Yoobin falls, and this time, she doesn’t get back up.

She taps a hand to her earpiece. “This is Bora. I’ve got Agent Dami subdued in the maintenance tunnel by detention. I think I managed to shake Handong’s control at the end of the fight, but I’d advise keeping her restrained until we can confirm.”

* * *

Yoohyeon's suspicions are proven correct when she encounters several squads of gunmen on her way to the detention level. They fire on her instantly, but their bullets are little more than irritants, and she tears her way through the group with minimal effort. 

What they do manage to do, however, is slow her down.

By the time she reaches the detention level, there is a group fiddling with the controls for the chamber that keeps Handong confined, the woman tapping her foot impatiently.

“Hello, sister,” she grins. “Here to stop me? I’m afraid you’re rather late to the party.”

Yoohyeon calls Mjolnir to her hand and prepares to throw it, but the sound of screams and tearing metal stays her hand for a moment. A deafening roar rings out, and a green behemoth charges through the wall across from her. Handong’s agents try to shoot it, and their bullets ping uselessly off its skin as it roars and swats them aside.

One of them is thrown against the console, hitting something with his body, and the door to the chamber starts opening. “Thank you,” Handong bows, striding towards the entrance. 

The behemoth turns to her, and Yoohyeon blinks as she sees a familiar pair of eyes. “Gahyeon?” she whispers. Iridescent green or not, she recognises the look in those eyes.

“Not Gahyeon. Hulk.” the behemoth grunts, tapping a hand to her chest as she does so.   


“Fascinating,” Handong mutters. “It seems the mindless beast is less mindless than I thought. Still, I really must be going. I've got a world to conquer, after all.”

Her hands glow, and she fires a bolt of searing magic that Yoohyeon is intimately familiar with, having seen, faced, and been on the receiving end of it on many an occasion. To the surprise of both, the Hulk swats it aside without the slightest inconvenience and roars.

The singular bolt becomes a barrage, and the Hulk charges through it like it isn’t even there, heading straight for Handong. Her eyes widen, lips mouthing an incantation that never leaves her lips as a green arm grabs her and pins her to the wall by her throat.

It starts to squeeze, and Handong claws at the arm in a frantic attempt to free herself. There is genuine fear in her eyes, and in that moment, Yoohyeon knows she can’t stand by and watch her sister die. Not again.

“Forgive me for this, Gahyeon,” she mutters, and throws Mjolnir at the transformed scientist. 

It bounces off the Hulk’s skin without doing any visible damage, but the blow does stagger the behemoth momentarily. Handong drops to the ground, gingerly massaging her throat, and the Hulk rounds on Yoohyeon and bellows.

“I’m not your enemy, Gahyeon!” she says, lifting her hands in surrender. “But I can’t let you kill my sister. We need her. _I_ need her. Please, just calm down.”

If she was someone different, then perhaps her attempt would have gone better than it did. But Yoohyeon had never been good with words or people in general, and as the green eyes narrow, she knows she’s said the wrong thing.

“Not Gahyeon!” the behemoth roars, pounding a fist against her chest. “Hulk!”

With that, she charges, and Yoohyeon reaches out, feeling for Mjolnir’s power and recalling the hammer to her. It reaches her hand with seconds to spare, and she swings the hammer hard into the Hulk’s chest.

She reels back, and Yoohyeon slams the hammer into her twice more before leaping and throwing both feet forward in an attempt to knock her away. Instead, her foot is caught in a massive fist, and the Hulk’s raging eyes glare at her before she’s thrown bodily against the side of the chamber. The wall shudders, but doesn’t break, and she tastes blood in her mouth.

It’s been a long time since brute strength alone has been enough to wound her, and she feels the lightning surge within her as she raises Mjolnir.

But before she can act, gunfire erupts from behind the Hulk, tracer rounds slamming into the massive back. With a roar, the Hulk turns, and Yoohyeon sees the three planes converging on them. “No!” she yells. “Get back!”

To their credit, they do try to run, but the Hulk leaps with incredible force and lands on the lead plane. She starts tearing it apart, ripping a wing loose and hurling the pilot from the cockpit before moving to the next. The last plane explodes when a massive fist tears through its engines, and the Hulk roars as she starts falling.

Yoohyeon watches the green form disappear through the clouds and prays that the scientist is as durable as she claims to be. Even she’s not sure she could survive a fall like that.

“Sister,” Handong coughs, and she turns to see the woman standing, her posture wary and uncertain. “You saved me. Why?”

It takes her a moment to answer. “We were raised together, we trained together, we fought together. I could always trust you to have my back, and I in turn did my best to support you in whatever endeavours I could. As far as I am concerned, that makes you my sister, Handong, my family to protect through thick and thin. Even if you choose to deny it.”

Something flashes in her sister’s eyes. “How noble,” she says softly, her eyes shifting from blue to brown for an instant. “It almost makes me regret doing this.”  


Yoohyeon feels something strike her hard from behind, and she’s sent flying towards Handong. Instead of the collision she expects, her sister’s form flickers and dissipates like mist, and she tumbles through the open door of the chamber.

It seals shut behind her, and she stares incredulously at her sister. “Are you ever not going to fall for that?” Handong asks, raising an eyebrow. She taps at the control panel, and the floor beneath the chamber opens up, letting the howling winds buffet it.

“The humans think us immortal. Shall we test that theory?”

Yoohyeon wants to shout, to scream, but the words stick in her mouth. Something feels off about the whole situation, but the anger and betrayal in her burn brightly to the exclusion of all else, warring with her desire to have her sister back.

“Step away from the controls, please,” a male voice says, and Handong turns. Agent Jun is standing at the door, an oddly familiar rifle in his hands. “You might recognise this,” he calls, and Yoohyeon recognises the orange glow of the Destroyer as the weapon hums with power. “We built this after we ran into the Destroyer last year. Even I don't know what it does. So unless you'd like tofind out, I’d—”

Handong disappears, reappearing behind him with her sceptre in hand, and Yoohyeon screams as she drives the weapon through Jun’s chest.

“You should have taken the shot when you had the chance,” she says dismissively, jerking the weapon free. The agent’s body slumps to the floor, rifle clattering to the ground beside him, and Handong walks over to the control.

Yoohyeon shoots her a murderous gaze as she reaches for the control, and sees something briefly flicker in Handong’s eyes before her sister’s hand touches the button.

Handong watches the chamber drop, and a single tear falls from her eye as she turns to leave.   


“You’ll lose, you know.” She turns, raising an eyebrow at Agent Jun, who has managed to prop himself up against a wall. “Bold words for a dying man. Your heroes are scattered, your floating fortress falls from the sky, and I’m about to walk out of here a free woman. Tell me, what disadvantage do you see?”

He chuckles weakly. “You lack conviction. I could see it in your eyes back there. Part of you didn’t want to do what you did, and that’s what's going to get you in the end. Also, another two things. One, Siyeon managed to stabilise the engines about five minutes ago. And two…”

The orange glow is all the warning Handong gets before she’s blasted through the wall, dust and metal raining down on her. The Destroyer’s beams have always hurt, and she groans in pain as she forms a familiar rune over her hand.

“Huh,” Agent Jun mutters, looking down at the weapon in his lap. “So that’s what it does.”

He knows he hasn’t killed her, and the brief blue glow he sees from the wreckage is all the confirmation he needs. Heavy footsteps run into the room moments later, and the Director kneels down in front of him.

“Sorry, boss. I couldn’t stop her.”

“Not a problem,” the Director says roughly, trying to put pressure on the wound. “Just stay awake. The medics will be here soon. Eyes on me.”

“We both know I’m not walking away from this one,” comes the faint whisper, and Joowon grits his teeth. “Not an option,” he says, as if words alone can prevent his old friend from dying.

Jun smiles at him weakly. “It’s okay, Joowon,” he whispers. “This whole plan, the Dreamcatcher Initiative? It was never going to work if they didn’t have something to tie them all together. Having someone to avenge should do the trick.”

His breathing slows to a stop, and Joowon watches as his eyes turn sightless and glassy.

The medics have finally arrived, pushing him away from the body in their haste, but he knows they won’t be able to do anything. There’s something he might be able to do for his old friend later, but for now, Joowon has one job, and it’s to make sure that his sacrifice wasn’t in vain.

He taps a finger to his earpiece. “Agent Jun is down. The medics are here. They called it.”


	3. Realisations

The mood is grim when Minji and Siyeon make it back to the bridge. Gahyeon and Yoohyeon’s chairs lie empty, as does Bora’s. They know she’s with Yoobin, standing watch over her friend, but it’s a cold comfort in the face of so much loss. 

Director Joowon Lee stands before them, his face more solemn than they’d ever seen it. He turns to Minji. “These were in Agent Jun’s jacket,” he says, tossing her a number of bloodstained cards. “He was going to get you to sign them, you know. I guess he’ll never get the chance now.”

Minji looks down. The picture on the card is one she recognises. It had been taken shortly after she’d been promoted to Captain, before she’d been added to the Hurricanes. Jun’s blood coats it, staining her hands red, and she closes her eyes and whispers a silent prayer for him.

Joowon sighs. “I’ll be honest with you, we’re almost dead in the air up here. You two did good work getting that engine back online, but we lost too much to do it. Our instruments. Gahyeon. Yoohyeon. Jun. I got nothing for you. I lost my one good eye,” he says, grief deep in his voice. “Maybe I had that coming. Yes, we were going to build an arsenal with the Tesseract. Direct orders from the people above even me. But I never put all my chips in that basket. My play was something even riskier.”

Minji lifts her head, idly flipping Jun’s card in her hands.

“There was an idea—Siyeon knows this—called the Dreamcatcher Initiative. To bring together a team of remarkable people and see if they could become something more. To see if they could work together when we needed them to, and fight the battles that we never could. Agent Jun died still believing in that idea. In heroes.”

Siyeon has remained uncharacteristically silent throughout the speech, her gaze fixed on the distant sky. But at this, she stands, and walks away from the table. After a few minutes, Minji follows her, and the Director sighs as he watches them go. “Well…it’s an old-fashioned notion.”

* * *

She finds Siyeon in the room where Jun died, staring at the bloodstain on the wall. “Did he have a wife? Kids? Girlfriend?”

The woman shakes her head. “Not that I knew of. The last one, maybe…he was pretty close with my sister during the last time we met. I was going to ask him about it after this was all over. I guess I'll never know now.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know him long, but he seemed like a good man.”

Siyeon closes her eyes. “He was an idiot,” she says bitterly. “He walked into a situation where he was hopelessly outgunned. He could have waited. He could have called for backup.”

“Sometimes you don’t have a choice in the matter, Siyeon,” Minji says, stepping closer to the woman. “Who would have been able to help him, anyway? You and I were out of the fight, Bora was stuck in a brawl, Gahyeon and Yoohyeon were gone. He did what he thought was best. Sometimes that’s all you can do.”

“I’ve heard that before. There’s always another way, always a chance that things could be different. You and I...we might have been able to help him. Joowon might have been able to send him backup. But he didn't even try to get us behind him. He tried to play hero.”

The words are angry, harsh, but there’s something else behind them, something that Minji recognises in an instant. She’s seen it before, felt it before, dealt with it too many times during the war. “Is this the first time you’ve lost someone?”

Siyeon turns to her. “No,” she whispers, a haunted look in her eyes. “Not the first time. But it always hurts just as much.” Her hands clench on the railing. “I’m going to get Handong for this, but I'm not dancing to Joowon’s tune. Not anymore. Not after this.”

“Neither am I. He’s got the same blood on his hands that Handong does. But right now, he’s not the problem. She is, and she’s in the wind. We need to find her, narrow down a list of locations.”

Something sparks in the woman’s eyes. “Every move she’s made has been personal. Sunmi’s a friend of Yoohyeon, and that’s why she took her. Same for Bora and Yoobin. The incident with the sceptre. And now Jun. She’s aiming to hit us where it hurts, and she’s done a bang-up job of it so far. The question is why. ‘Divided we fall’ is all well and good in practice, but she knows she has to take us out to win. So why?”

“Morale? In my day, we would target supply lines, harass the enemy any way we could. Breaking someone’s spirit can be more effective than killing them outright.”

“No, it’s more than that. She’s too calculating for the answer to be that simple. No, she’s planning something bigger. Handong’s got a flair for dramatics. She’s a princess, possibly a literal one if Yoohyeon’s heritage is accurate, and she wants to be queen of the castle once this is done. She wants to be noticed, wants to draw the biggest crowd possible, and that makes one place in particular come to mind.”

“The Tower,” Minji breathes. “We’ve got to move. Can you fix the suit in time?”

“I can get it up and running in a few minutes, and I’ve got a plan. You’ll need to get the others. Bora should be up for it, maybe Yoobin as well if we’re lucky. And you should tell Joowon, I guess. We’ll need all the help we can get.”

“On it,” the soldier nods, and Siyeon turns to go.

“Wait!” She looks back. Minji is staring at her regretfully. “What I said back there, with the sceptre…I’m sorry. I should never have used Hyolyn against you like that.”

For a moment, Siyeon looks suspicious, but then she sighs. “Don’t be. I’m surprised it took you so long to blow up at me, considering that I thought Happyface would have poisoned you against me from the start. Tell me, what do you actually know about me, apart from the obvious?”

“Not much,” Minji admits. “Old articles. Inventions, military work, awards. A lot of articles about your personal life. Drugs and alcohol and a lot of sleeping around. I didn’t know what to think. But I try not to judge people before I’ve spent a while around them.” 

Siyeon looks at her intently. “Nothing about my childhood? Nothing about Afghanistan?”

She shakes her head. “No.”

A bitter laugh leaves the woman’s lips. “That explains a lot. Captain…how well did you know her? How long did you know Hyolyn?”

“Not as long as people like to think. I knew her by reputation, mostly, but when my mentor…my best friend was stuck behind enemy lines, I went to her. I was desperate, looking for any help I could get to save her, and Hyolyn stepped up. She gave me the shield, took the fall for me from the higher-ups. It was hard not to become her friend after that. With the war going on, we didn’t have much time to chat, but we got along well.”

“Ah,” Siyeon closes her eyes. “Apparently, you left quite the impression, then. I won’t tell you about Afghanistan, you can ask Bora for that if you’re curious, but after you went into the ice, people say it changed my mother. Hyolyn never stopped looking for you. It’s one of the few clear memories I have of her.”

She meets Minji’s eyes, her gaze blank and unreadable. “You might be wondering why that’s the case. Ten years after I was born, my parents died in a car crash. A complete accident, the coroners said. They died while they were looking for you, and suddenly I and my sister were alone in the world, heirs to a fortune we would have traded in a heartbeat to have them back. We did what we could. We looked out for each other. We built the company up, made it better, made it what it is today. She's the only family I have left. Everything we've done has been to make them proud.”

The guilt bubbles up in her chest, raw and painful and completely, absolutely _deserved_, as far as Minji’s concerned. “I’m sorry,” she offers again, her voice little more than a broken rasp. “I didn’t know.”

“I know, Minji,” Siyeon says simply. It is the first time she’s called Minji by her name since the incident in the lab. “You’re a good person, just like my parents said. My head knows that. My heart….not so much. What’s left of it, anyway,” she chuckles. “So don’t be surprised if I’m a little cold to you for a while.”

“You should be,” Minji returns, wiping away the tears that have decided to gather in her eyes. “What I did was unforgivable. And the Director…he knew about that?”

“He did.”

“Then after this, he and I need to have a word, I think. For now, we have a world to save.”

* * *

Yoobin blinks the dark spots from her eyes. The world seems different to her, tarred in all the wrong colors. Her skin is an angry red, dark veins bulging out, and she grimaces, tensing her muscles against the restraints. “Yoobin,” a soft voice whispers. Bora’s voice. “You need to snap out of it. You’re going to hurt yourself if you keep doing this.”

She closes her eyes.

When she opens them again, the world has returned to some semblance of normality, and Bora’s concerned eyes are staring back at her. “I’m okay,” she murmurs. “I’m still me. But I can’t stop, not yet. I can still feel her in the back of my mind. You….do you know what it’s like to be trapped in your own head? To have to watch as someone scrapes through your head until your mind’s raw and bleeding and scarred with the marks of them trying to unmake you?”

“You know I do.”

“How did you even get me back? I fought her so hard, so long, but I couldn’t…I couldn’t do anything.”

“Percussive maintenance,” the spy answers. “When we fought back there, you nearly put a blade in my neck. I slammed you head-first into a railing. Really, really hard.”

“Explains the headache,” Yoobin mutters. Faces swim in front of her eyes. Agents, soldiers, mercenaries, arrows sprouting from their bodies. A man in a posh suit, eye hanging freely from its socket. “Bora? Do you know how many people I killed while…”

“Don’t go there,” the spy growls, and there’s a coldness to her voice that the archer knows intimately. “That wasn’t you. You can’t blame yourself for what you did under her control. I've been down that road before, and it doesn’t end well. When we find Handong, I am going to make her pay for what she did to you.”

Yoobin laughs, and feels the dregs of Handong’s influence slowly seeping away. “Well, I suppose putting a few arrows into her would help me sleep better. I feel like a bit of target practice could be in order as well.”

“I’ll hold her down for you if you want,” Bora offers, pretending to pin a person to the wall, and they share a quiet laugh before Yoobin turns to her. 

“What did she do to you? You seem off. You’re a spy, not a soldier, but you’re ready to go to war.”

Bora closes her eyes. “To me? Nothing. But she’s hurt a lot of people I care about. You. Jun. Before the attack on the Helicarrier, there was…an incident with the sceptre. A lot of things were said that shouldn’t have been said. Singnie came off worst.”

The archer blinks. “I knew you cared a lot about her, but this…you’re compromised, aren’t you?”

“I am,” she admits quietly. “I think I have been for a while.”

“After this, you should ask her out.”

“You must be joking,” the spy says flatly, and Yoobin laughs. It feels good to laugh with her again, good to do something this simple and feel like the action is hers and hers alone. “Are you telling me the infamous Black Widow is scared to do something as simple as that?”

“I did promise to treat her to tteokbokki back in Germany.”

“There we go. You already have the date planned. Just add a few steps to it. You like each other, you’re both hot as hell, you get along well. Sounds like a match made in heaven to me.”

Bora shoots her an unamused look. “If you tell her any of this before I’m ready, Yoobin, I’ll make sure there’s nothing of you left to hide after the murder.”

The door hisses open, and they turn to it as Minji steps into the room. “Good to see you’re okay, Bora,” she says, ignoring Yoobin. The archer doesn’t take it personally; she doesn’t know the soldier very well, and after her unwilling stint with Handong, she wouldn’t be particularly friendly to herself either. “Up for a mission?”

She gets a snort in response. “Ready and waiting, Minji.”

“Good. Because Siyeon figured out where Handong’s going; the Tower. She’s said she can get the suit back online before long, so that’s her sorted, but…umm…” She fidgets nervously for a while, then sighs. “The last time I flew something, I slept for seventy years. I can’t trust myself behind the cockpit again. Not yet, anyway.”

Bora lays a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. “If we’re quick, we can take one of the faster planes. I swear, if we get stuck in a VTOL again, I’m actually going to shoot myself.”

Yoobin stands. “I’m coming with you.” Minji turns cautious eyes on her. “Do you trust her?” the soldier asks, turning to Bora. The spy nods. “With my life.”

“My head feels like it’s been through a paper shredder,” the archer admits, “but I can still shoot. And if you think I’m passing up a chance to put an arrow or two into Handong, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.” The soldier looks at her intently before nodding, and Bora grins. “Good thing I saved these for you, then,” she says, holding out her bow and a quiver of arrows.

It almost makes Yoobin smile. Almost.

* * *

Yoohyeon grunts as she picks herself up. She’d managed to break out of the chamber before it had hit the ground, but it had been close, too close, and she’d plowed into the ground heavily. She was not invincible, as Handong was so fond of reminding her; the many aches across her body were a testament to that, and she was pretty sure some of them would bruise later.

Mjolnir calls to her, singing its familiar song, and she trudges over to where she senses the feeling. She doesn’t try to summon it. When she finds the hammer, it’s head down in a field, the handle waiting for her expectantly.

Yoohyeon hesitates. She’s done a lot of things since coming to Earth, and not many of them are good. She’s insulted humanity, the race she’s sworn to defend. She’s mocked her allies, and in Gahyeon’s case, attacked them, all to save a sister who still betrayed her in the end. An innocent man’s blood was on her hands.  


Could she still lift the hammer? Because in that moment, she had never felt less worthy to wield it.

She sits. Her gaze is fixed on the weapon, but her thoughts are elsewhere. Handong had betrayed her again, just like she’d done in Asgard. It should be a simple thing to consider her sister a traitor and liar after that, but something sits wrong with her about the sensation. 

For a while, she wonders whether she’s simply unwilling to hurt the woman.

Contrary to what most might believe, her adulation in Asgard had not simply been given to her. Being the Allfather’s daughter had certainly granted her some leeway, but the title carried many downsides as well. She was no fool; she knew her teachers discussed her failings behind her back, wondering what he must think of her. Her successes, meanwhile, had rarely carried weight with her peers; they'd always been along the lines of "not bad" or "as expected of the Allfather's kin."

The first time Yoohyeon remembers truly being praised was in battle. It had been before she’d earned the right to bear Mjolnir. She’d come up against a Frost Giant veteran on her own, her squad split off from her, and his strength and skill had pushed her to the brink. It had been the first time she’d felt the storm within her, and the wild, uncontrolled energy surging from her body had caught the Frost Giant off guard as he sought to finish her. He'd reeled in surprise, the lightning burning his skin, and her axe had buried itself in his head.

When she’d returned, the people had hailed her as a hero. Thor, Goddess of Thunder. The first title she had borne that had no ties to her father.

Things had improved much for her since then, but she had never forgotten the pain of being a shadow. So when her mother had told her that she would soon receive a sibling, Yoohyeon had sworn to do what she could to prevent her new sister from sharing the same fate. For a time, she’d even succeeded in that regard, and she closes her eyes, remembering a day that remains dear to her heart.

_“Oh sister,” Handong calls, her singsong voice echoing through the orchard. “Won’t you come out and play?”_

_Yoohyeon watches carefully from her hiding spot. She’d discarded her armour earlier, leaving it scattered around the orchard as bait for her sister, while she herself snuck around the edges of the area looking for places to hide. _ _Right now, she was at the top of an apple tree, nestled closely between the leaves. Handong passes under her twice, peering around curiously, and then leaves to go in another direction._

_Yoohyeon sighs in relief, and is just about to move again when a form pounces on her from behind. She almost falls out of the tree, but catches herself just in time, and she’s about to retaliate when warm breath tickles her ear._

_“Good try,” Handong grins, “but while you may be my Little Apple, Yoohyeon, your cape isn’t quite apple-red enough to hide you from me.”_

_She’d taken the loss gracefully and left to go train afterwards, happy to see the smile on her face. So when she comes back in the evening and sees a sullen Handong poking at her food, she knows something’s gone horribly wrong._

_“What’s wrong?” she asks, dropping Mjolnir and kneeling gently beside her sister. “Was it your teachers? Did they do something to you?”_

_Handong shakes her head. “No. It’s just…” she sighs. “I cast a teleportation spell today. My first ever, and it came out perfectly.”_

_“That’s brilliant news!”_

_Her sister slumps. “I thought so too. But the other students…the others my age…they hated me. Jealousy I can deal with, but most of them aren’t even jealous. They just think magic’s going to be a useless skill to have before long, even on the battlefield. Especially on the battlefield. They don't even think about the applications it could have. I know you’ve said to give it time, Yoohyeon, but…I talked to my teacher. He’s supportive of me, but he doesn’t think their minds will ever change on that. Not within my lifetime, anyway. He suggested my talents might be more appreciated in the other realms.”_

_Her voice trembles. “I don’t want to leave you, Yoohyeon. I don’t want to leave mother either. I know you two do what you can, but…there are some days where I just feel so alone. Like I’ll never be seen by anyone else in Asgard.”_

_Yoohyeon is a warrior born and bred, and in that moment, she has never regretted it more. This is not something she can fight with her fists and weapons. This is something Handong must come to terms with on her own. But that doesn’t mean she can’t try to help._

_She pulls Handong close, cupping her hands gently around the woman’s face. “Listen to me, Handong. You’re my sister. My beautiful, talented, wonderful sister, and if people can’t see that, they don’t deserve you. Nothing they do should stop you from being the best person you can be. And if Asgard cannot see that…if you should decide that another realm is best for you, then I will come with you. I promise.”_

_Handong sniffles softly and buries her head into Yoohyeon’s chest. “Thank you,” she whispers quietly. “Thank you, Little Apple.”_

In the years afterwards, she’d tried to change people’s minds, she really had, but magic had long been considered a dying art in Asgard, and her words alone could never have overturned centuries of prejudice. Handong had faced mockery wherever she went, while Yoohyeon was met with nothing but praise. Perhaps that was what had made her sister so bitter towards her.

Could Handong have changed that much from the sister she remembered? Did she truly hate her enough to do that? Yoohyeon recalls the events that had ended with her fall from the Helicarrier, and slowly shakes her head.

No, there had been genuine pain in Handong’s eyes as she’d dropped her. Some part of her still cared about Yoohyeon. But she’d done it anyway. Why?

She thinks back on the situation, running every little detail over in her mind. She has never been Handong’s equal in this regard, but between her lessons and the many tricks her sister has played on her over the years, she’s learned to analyse things carefully before jumping to conclusions.

One detail in particular jumps out at her, and her eyes widen.

Handong’s eyes were blue when she’d fought her, but that wasn’t right. Her sister’s eyes were hazel brown, a much lighter shade of the color than Yoohyeon’s darker orbs. They were beautiful, expressive in a way that the woman’s face was rarely allowed to show, and she’d often complimented them, much to her sister’s embarrassment.

They were one of the few ways in which Yoohyeon could pick out her sister while the latter was transformed. Her eyes had never been blue. The Director had said that the sceptre made the eyes of those it controlled blue. The same blue that had been in Handong’s eyes.

Could Handong be under the control of someone else? It seems impossible, but the evidence all points to it, and Yoohyeon knows she can’t just sit by and wait. She has to find Handong.

She grabs Mjolnir’s handle, and feels the familiar surge of power rush through her body as she calls to the storm, her full armour materialising in the crash of thunder and the flash of lightning.

Siyeon hears the storm in the distance as she works to fix her armour, and smiles as the eyes of the Iron Maiden flicker to life.

* * *

Gahyeon groans, shielding her eyes against the light as she blinks up at the sky. That had certainly been one of her less pleasant transformations. Her legs feel wobbly, and an attempt to stand leaves her quickly falling back down. 

“Are you alright?” a man’s voice asks, and she turns to see a wizened-looking security guard peering down into the hole. “That was quite the fall you had there.” Briefly, she glances downwards, relieved to see the rags of her shirt and trousers still in place. At least she doesn’t have to worry about accidentally flashing someone.

“Yeah. Just sore. Did I hurt anyone?” she asks, looking around the area. She seems to have crashed in a warehouse, the machinery cracked and dilapidated around the crater she lies in.

He shakes his head. “No. There’s no one around here to hurt. No one for miles. This place has been shut for months, and I’m only here out of habit and because I saw the crash.”

Gahyeon sighs in relief. “Lucky.”

“Or just good aim. You were awake when you fell.” She freezes. “And I didn’t try to hurt you?”

Another shake of the head. “No. You just looked at me, I backed off a bit, and then you just sighed and changed back from whatever it is you were.” Siyeon’s words about the Hulk come back to her, and Gahyeon wonders if there’s more to them than just theory and desperate hope. 

“Are you an alien?” he asks. She shakes her head, and he gives her a pitying look. “Then you’ve got one hell of a condition there.”

Despite herself, Gahyeon laughs. “You have no idea,” she says, and makes another attempt to stand. She sways a bit, but she stays upright. 

“Brought you a few things. Didn’t think these would fit you until you shrunk back down, though.” The guard throws her a shirt and a pair of pants, and she puts them on gratefully. “Thank you.”

He shrugs noncommittally. “Didn’t feel right to just leave you there with nothing. I—”

A phone starts ringing, the tune of Imagine Dragons’s ‘Demons’ reaching her ears, and Gahyeon looks at him expectantly. “It’s not me,” he says, lifting his phone as proof. She raises an eyebrow and dips into her own pockets. To her surprise, she finds a slightly battered smartphone in the rags of her old pants.

It unlocks at her touch, and she holds it to her ear. “Hello?”

“Gahyeon! Well, that’s one plan of mine that worked, anyway,” Siyeon’s voice chirps, and the scientist blinks. “I don’t…how did you even…”

She trails off in a sputter, and Siyeon chuckles over the line. “I may have slipped the phone into your pocket while we were in the lab,” she says sheepishly. “Wanted to make sure you had a way to contact me after all this, even if you don’t want to come to the Tower. We scientists have to stick together, right?”

Gahyeon shakes her head. She doubts she’ll ever fully understand the way that the billionaire’s mind works, but she doesn’t mind it. It’s refreshingly different. It's been a long time since someone’s cared about her enough to do something like this. “Right,” she says warmly. “I’m glad you did, and even more glad I’ve still got it after everything that’s happened, but I take it this isn’t a social call.”

“I wish. I figured out where Handong’s going. Remember what you said before? The ‘warm light for all mankind?’ It was a pretty big hint, and when I had Wolf check for disturbances, he found something on the roof. He hasn’t been able to remove it on his own. I’m on my way there now, and Minji and the rest shouldn’t be far behind. Not sure what happened to our resident thunder goddess, but if you survived the fall, she probably did too. We could use the help, if you’re willing.”

New York. She was hoping she’d been wrong before, but it made a good amount of sense. Handong’s sense of dramatics, the specific needs for her power source, the potential impact that the fall of such a high-profile location would have on the world……The city had probably always been her target. But could she risk being there? Could she really risk the Hulk rampaging through the city, especially with the potential for collateral involved?

Her silence must be telling, because the phone crackles. “Look, if you don’t want to risk it, I understand. Just keep yourself safe, and make sure you get away from Happyface or anyone else who wants to use you. And keep the phone, alright? Just in case you run into trouble or could use a friendly face.”

Siyeon wasn’t afraid of her, wasn't afraid of the Hulk. She’d even treated it like a positive thing.  _“Every time the Hulk’s been sighted, she’s never been the aggressor. Sure, she’s fought back, but she’s never outright rampaged through a civilian populace for the hell of it.”_

And now she had the security guard’s words to contend with. He’d claimed that she’d been conscious when she fell. If that was the case, then the Hulk had aimed to break her fall with the building, and had specifically chosen a place with no one around to hurt. 

He could be lying, of course. But he has no reason to do that, and Gahyeon is adept at telling when someone is lying to her. She doesn’t see it in him. She’s been running from the Hulk for so long, even after figuring out the secret of the transformation. She’s always thought of her other side as a burden, a curse she keeps hidden away for the sake of those around her. Maybe it’s time she stopped.

“I’ll be there,” she says. “I promise.” The call briefly morphs into a video one, and Siyeon blows her a kiss before she hangs up.

Gahyeon slips the phone into her pocket and turns back towards the security guard. “Someplace you need to be?” he asks. 

“New York. I don’t suppose I’ve gotten lucky for once and landed nearby, have I?”

He shrugs. “Actually, you’re not far off. If the traffic isn’t terrible, you’ll reach the city in twenty minutes if you drive along that road.” He tosses her a pair of keys and gestures to an old-fashioned motorcycle. “You can take that. It’s been here since the place closed, and I’ve been fixing it up over time. Was thinking of selling it, but I reckon you could probably use it more.”

"Thank you. And please, whatever you do, stay away from New York for now. Things are about to get really bad there."

* * *

“Sir?”

The Director turns his head and sees Park walking towards him, a troubled look on her face. “Yes, Agent Park?”

“Those cards…they were in Jun’s locker, not his jacket,” she says carefully.

He sighs. “They needed the push. Before his death, he told me that the Dreamcatcher Initiative was never going to work without something to unite them. I wasn’t about to let his death go to waste. No matter what. He’ll give me hell for it later, though.”

His comm chooses that moment to chime, and he taps a hand to it wearily. “Yes?”

“Director, we’ve just had an unauthorised launch,” the agent on the other side tells him. “One of the Quinjets. I’m sorry, Director, but it was the Captain, the Widow and the Hawk. I wasn’t about to get between them and their goal.”

He casts his gaze past the bridge and sees the Quinjet soaring away through the windows. A familiar streak of red and gold jets past them moments later. “Do you know where they’re headed?”

“Yeah. They said to tell you that they were going to the Tower. They think it’s where Handong plans to unleash her army.”

“Get us moving at full speed towards New York!” he orders. “All hands to battle stations! If they’re right, we’re about to have one hell of a fight on our hands.


	4. Opening Night

Even in its damaged state, the suit retains its speed, and Siyeon soon finds herself outstripping the Quinjet. Still, she's fully aware of its capabilities in this state, and she makes her decision. “I’ll fly on ahead, see if I can get a read on the situation. I might be able to disable the device if I get there in time, and if not, it’ll give me a chance to change suits. If we do end up having to fight an army, I’d rather put my best foot forwards.”

“Okay,” Bora radios. “We’ll catch up as soon as we can. Be careful, Siyeon. I know you can handle yourself, but don’t underestimate Handong for a second.”

“Don’t be a hero,” Minji warns. “Don’t do anything you don’t have to.”

“Will do.” She reroutes power to the thrusters and blasts ahead, leaving them behind in seconds. She knows the suit’s limits, knows its top speed, and while she doesn’t think she can maintain it for long, it should get her to New York within minutes.

Rerouting power to damaged systems does have an unfortunate side-effect, though. It takes her only five minutes to reach New York, but her thrusters are in a sorry state by the time she arrives, sputtering in and out of life. They falter twice more as she speeds towards the Tower, making her flight more erratic than she’d like, and she prays they’ll hold out long enough for her to do what she needs to.

“Wolf, give me a sit-rep,” she says. “What are we looking at?”

“The Tesseract is housed in a device on the rooftop, madam. I’ve shut off the power to the building, but the device is already self-sustaining, and I have no way to remove it from its position.” 

Right, she’d never weaponised the Tower, not even with defensive systems. “Remind me to get you some fangs to work with here after this whole mess is over, will you?”

“With pleasure, madam.” 

She soars upward, her flight path a little less than graceful as her thrusters give out again, and hovers shakily over the rooftop. A thought strikes her. “Wolf, please tell me she’s safe.”

“Your sister is still in DC, madam. As of ten minutes ago, I believe she was practicing for the live performance she has tomorrow.”

“I guess I’m on the clock, then.” The device reminds her of a bastardised Arc Reactor, the Tesseract hovering at its core, and she turns her attention towards the figure beside it. “Shut it down, Doctor Sunmi.” 

The scientist turns, and Siyeon sees the unnatural blue in her eyes. “It’s too late,” she calls. “You can’t stop it now. The Tesseract wants to show us something! A new universe. A new species.”

“Does that sceptre also infect people with crazy?” Siyeon mutters, and aims her repulsors at the device. A strange blue shield surrounds it as she does so, and she fires, praying the weapons still work. To her relief, they do, but they don’t have the effect she’s hoping for. Instead of turning the device to slag, they combine, rebound and strike her in the chest with twice the force she’d fired with.

The force behind the blast sends Sunmi flying, knocking her out against the air vents, and Siyeon flips end over end through the air before she manages to stabilise. “The barrier is pure energy, madam,” Wolf reports. “It’s unbreakable.”

“Yeah, I got that,” she winces, rubbing her chest. “Ouch.” She looks down, and sees Handong right where she’d expected the woman to be, the Asgardian staring up at her from the penthouse’s balcony.

“Plan B, then,” she says, and descends onto the array she’d walked on only days before. 

“Madam, the Mark VII is not ready for deployment. There are final tests to be run, diagnostics to go over, system checks—”

“Step on it, then, and skip the usual dramatics,” she orders, walking calmly towards the penthouse. Handong mirrors her movements, walking calmly into the penthouse from the opposite entrance. “Besides, if you have a better option, I’d be happy to hear it.”

Wolf pauses. “I will have the Mark VII online in another three minutes, madam,” he says stiffly. “Please do your best to avoid dying in that time. Your sister would be most unhappy with you, and by proxy, me.”

“Stall for time? Who do you take me for, Wolf?” Despite her words, she’s painfully aware of her own vulnerability as she steps into the room.

“Please tell me you’re going to appeal to my humanity,” Handong grins, strolling forward without a care in the world. The sceptre that killed Jun gleams in her right hand, and Siyeon does her best to ignore it as she steps towards the bar. “Actually, I’m planning to threaten you,” she says nonchalantly.

The Asgardian laughs. “You should have left your armour on for that.”

“Yeah. It’s seen some mileage, you know, what with the thing in Germany, getting clobbered by your sister’s hammer, getting hurled through what’s basically a meat grinder…now that I think about it, I’m surprised it's held up this well. Still, I’d rather not pit a suit in that state against the glowstick of destiny there.”

The words seem to fill her with a temporary confidence, and she takes a deep breath and lets it go as she steps behind the bar. “Want a drink?” 

Handong steps closer. “Stalling me won’t change anything.”

“Not stalling, threatening,” Siyeon corrects, ignoring the part of her that screams as she turns her back on the woman. “No drink? I’m having one,” she says, pulling a tumbler off the shelf and pouring herself a small glass of whatever it contains.

“The Chitauri are coming. Nothing will change that.” The Asgardian gazes out the windows before turning back to her. “What do I have to fear?”

“Dreamcatcher.” Handong makes an odd face at the name, and Siyeon shrugs. “That’s what we’re supposed to be called, anyway. Joowon had a big speech about it all. An ‘Earth’s Mightiest Heroes’ type of thing, working together to save the world. Very old-fashioned of him.”

“Ah, yes. I believe I’ve met you all already.”

“Yeah. Took us a while to get any traction on that front, especially since most of us hadn’t actually _met_ before today, but we’re getting there, you know? Still, let’s do a quick headcount. We’ve got your sister, the demigoddess—” An odd look flits over the Asgardian’s face, and Siyeon takes the opportunity to reach for a pair of bracelets resting on the table, snapping the simple ornaments around her wrists. 

“Touchy subject? Sorry about that, moving on. You’ve got the super soldier, a living legend who honestly kind of lives up to the legend; a woman with breathtaking anger management issues and several more things besides; a pair of master assassins, and what you’ve managed to do, princess, is piss off every single one of them.”

“That was the plan,” Handong grins. “And I notice you didn’t include yourself in that roster.”

“Not a great plan. And me? Technically I’m just a consultant, according to Joowon, but really, I think my membership goes without saying. You don’t think so?” She doesn’t wait for the woman to answer before she presses on. “When they come, they’ll come for you.”

“I have an army.”  


“We have a Hulk,” Siyeon retorts, and the woman snorts. “I thought the beast had wandered off.”

“Don’t call Gahyeon that,” she glares. “But we’re missing the point here. Maybe your army comes and maybe it’s too much for us, but there’s no scenario here where you take home the win. Because if we can't protect the Earth, you can be damn well sure we’ll avenge it, and we’ll take as many of you down with us as we can.”

Handong’s smile turns cold, and Siyeon downs the rest of her drink as the woman steps closer to her. “How will your friends have time to fight me,” she says, “when they’re so busy fighting you?”

She moves before Siyeon can react and taps the sceptre lightly to the center of her chest. There's a metallic clink as it touches the Arc Reactor, and Siyeon flinches as she waits for something to happen, for her mind to come under attack or for Handong to shove the weapon through her chest.

Nothing happens, and Handong pulls the weapon away, a confused look on her face. 

“This usually works,” she mutters, repeating the process twice more with similar results.

“Performance issues,” she shrugs, doing her best to calm her rapid breathing. “Not exactly uncommon. Stage fright, maybe? Anxious for your big mome—” The woman grabs her and throws her to the floor. 

“Any time now, Wolf,” she mutters, picking herself up painfully. Handong’s hand grabs her by the throat again. “You will all fall before me,” the Asgardian hisses, and Siyeon claws at her arm as she feels the pressure on her throat increase.

“Deploy!” she yells. “Deploy!”

Handong throws her towards the window, and Siyeon feels the glass shatter and slice her as she goes through it and starts tumbling to the ground below. She hears Handong grunt over the howling wind as something metal strikes her, and she does her best to level out.

The wind tears at her face and steals her breath, but she forces her arms to extend, tilting the bracelets up for scanning. It seems to take an age before they chime and the suit catches up to her. The armour encloses her swiftly, coating her arms and legs and chest. The helmet clicks over her face, systems coming online, and _shit, she’s coming in fast, and there are civilians below her—_

Siyeon throws her hands forward and engages all flight systems in the second the armour comes online, and she hears several bystanders scream and duck for cover as she halts her fall barely five feet from the ground. “My apologies for the delay, madam,” Wolf says in her ear.

“Better late than never,” she says, and the Mark VII hums with power as she jets back upwards. 

Handong is still standing at the window when she makes it back to penthouse level, and the Asgardian stares at her with a grudging respect as the suit hovers in front of her. “And there’s one more person you pissed off,” Siyeon snarls, her face mirroring the scowl of her helmet. “His name was Jun.”

She fires, striking Handong in the chest as she tries to fire the sceptre, and the Asgardian lets out a cry of pain as she’s sent skidding across the floor. 

Siyeon doesn’t even have time to celebrate, because in that moment, a blue beam erupts from the Tesseract. A massive portal tears its way into existence above the Tower, and hundreds of snarling, grey-skinned figures pour from it, brandishing strange-looking rifles and riding atop crude fliers.

Her HUD lights up in red, analysing armour, weapons, numbers. “Right,” she swallows. “Army.”

She soars into the sky, her repulsors thrumming with power. To her relief, they work just as well on the aliens as they do on the rest of her foes, and she takes out four of them in quick succession, dodging and weaving as streaks of blue light fill the air around her. 

There’s too much to dodge, too much to process, and she grunts as she collides with one, turning the unfortunate pilot’s vehicle to scrap. Her targeting system fills with the red of hostiles, and she fires some of the micro-rockets in her shoulder-mounted launchers, obliterating dozens of them in an instant.

But there are just too many of them, and Siyeon swears as the creatures descend towards the city.

* * *

Yoohyeon arrives to see New York under attack, Chitauri swarming from the portal in droves. She sees Siyeon trying to hold them off, but there are far too many for any one person to stop. 

_To cripple an army, you must cut off its head,_ she thinks, and heads straight for the Tower. Handong is waiting for her, the woman’s full armour materialising in a shimmer of gold, and her sister turns to her as Yoohyeon alights on the floor below.

“Handong!” she yells. “Turn off the Tesseract or I’ll destroy it!”

“You can’t!” her sister replies simply. “Even you and all your power cannot destroy pure energy, sister. There is no stopping this. There is only the war.”

She looks desperately for any sign of Handong in those eyes, and finds nothing but cold blue staring back at her. “So be it,” she says grimly, and Handong lets out a warcry as she leaps from the balcony and brings the sceptre swinging down.

Yoohyeon sidesteps it and brings Mjolnir across in a sweeping blow that her sister parries. The parry turns into a wide swing, and she’s forced to duck and weave as her sister twirls and fires the sceptre twice. Great chunks of the building come away at the spots where the blue blasts strike, and Yoohyeon catches a brief glimpse of the destruction as she calls to the sky and fires a bolt of lightning.

  
This isn't how Handong fights at all. It's a style she doesn't recognise, a style that's decidedly _alien_, and it's that which has been throwing her off so badly.

Yoohyeon growls as shelunges forward and locks Mjolnir's hilt against the sceptre. Controlling it is the key to victory.

* * *

Minji paces anxiously as they soar through the sky. Bora’s face is cold and expressionless, and Yoobin wears a grim look as she checks her equipment for the final time. When they burst through the clouds, they see an alien army descending on the city, and Minji sucks in a breath at the scale of the attack. All of them are looking anxiously for one thing, and when they see it, they breathe a sigh of relief.

The red and gold of Iron Maiden shoots through the sky, the orange streak of her repulsors firing into the mass. Bora reaches for the radio. “Siyeon, we’re coming up on your three, east side,” she says.

“What, did you stop for drive-through? Swing up Park, I’m going to lay them out for you.” 

“On it.”

She’s used to ground combat, not aerial battles, but the thought of sitting back and watching while her friends fought was anathema to Minji. “Are there any weapons on this thing that aren’t pilot-controlled?”

Bora flips a switch in the cockpit, and each of their seats shift until they’re behind the controls of what appear to be turrets. “Thought you’d never ask,” she says, angling the jet towards the avenue and readying her own weapons. “Let’s raise some hell for Siyeon.”

They rush towards the avenue, weapons at the ready, and when Siyeon comes roaring down the street ahead of them with a dozen aliens trailing her, they open fire. Minji and Yoobin shred the first six in a hail of gunfire, and the missile Bora fires takes out everyone left.

Siyeon doesn’t see them, but she hears the gunfire and sees a dozen blips on her trail fade away. “Madam, we have more incoming,” Wolf informs her, and she sighs. “Yeah, I know.” 

She opens her comm channel. “Nice work back there, but we’re not going to win this through skirmishes alone. I saw sparks around the top of the tower, so I think Yoohyeon must be up there; Bora, see if you can back her up. If we can take Handong down, we might be able to cut the army off before more of them can come through. I’ll keep the Chitauri occupied.”

She peels off, taking a good number of the aliens with her, and the jet soars upwards to the penthouse floor. “I see them,” Bora says, seeing the two battling on the balcony. Yoohyeon swings wide, getting her head slammed through a glass railing for her trouble, and the spy winces at the sight. “Let’s get in there. Minji, Yoobin, you have a shot?”

“Got my hands full,” Minji responds, yanking at her controls. “We’ve got some strays chasing us.”

She fires, and the chaingun barks its report as she shreds one of the fliers under a hail of bullets. “I’m usually not much for guns, but I do like this.” 

There’s a childlike grin on her face as she says it, and Bora would smile at it if the situation was any less dangerous. As it is, she doesn’t have time for that. She has to focus. “Keep them off us, Minji. Yoobin, got a shot?”

They rise above the penthouse level and see Yoohyeon and Handong battling across the balcony. Yoohyeon blocks a sweeping strike from her sister and swings Mjolnir, but a quick twist from the latter sends her strike wide. Handong immediately punishes her by slamming the sceptre's hilt into her head, and the thunder goddess stumbles.

“I see her,” Yoobin says, and she opens fire. Handong snarls as the bullets strike her, bouncing off her armour, and she covers her face with an arm as she raises the sceptre and fires. Bora banks left, but the blast is too quick, and the Quinjet’s left wing bursts into flame. “Left engine’s down,” she reports, doing her best to control their descent. “Better buckle up, this isn’t going to be the softest landing.”

Yoohyeon sees the jet going down and roars, charging Handong in a fury. She smashes the sceptre aside and locks her hands in a vice-grip as Handong struggles. “Look around you, sister! Look at what you’re doing to this world! Is this the legacy you want your rule to have?”

  
  
Something falters in her sister’s eyes, and she presses forward. “Is this truly what you wish for, Handong? You swore to be the best person you could, regardless of what people thought of you. This is not the work of the sister I know.” 

Her eyes flicker from blue to brown, and Handong slumps. “It’s too late. Too late.” Yoohyeon pulls her closer, clasping her sister’s shoulders. “No. Not yet. We can do this together, sister. You need to fight back.” Handong’s body tenses with incredible effort, her hands trembling under the strain. “Can’t,” she gasps. “Can’t fight him!”

Her eyes are flickering wildly, eerie blue warring with hazel brown, and Yoohyeon can only watch as her sister struggles. “Who’s controlling you?” she asks desperately. “Who’s making you do this?”

“T—” The eerie blue presses further and she doubles over as the brown in her eyes starts to fade. “Yoohyeon…Little Apple…Run! Can’t stop—”

Then the blue takes over completely, and Handong sneers at her, hands moving to her belt and drawing a small, thin dagger. Yoohyeon doesn’t move in time, still stricken by the revelation, and she grunts in pain as the blade works its way between her armour plates and digs into her stomach.

“Pathetic,” Handong snarls, but grimaces as her eyes flicker and she doubles over. She stumbles away and rolls off the edge, catching hold of a Chitauri flier as she does so. 

Yoohyeon watches her go, still numb to the whole idea. Someone is controlling her sister. Someone incredibly powerful. She has to stop this. She has to free her. But Mjolnir sings to her, and she grits her teeth, remembering her oath, her promises, her duty.

The Chitauri are the greater threat; she’ll have to help her sister later. She yanks out the knife, tucking the little blade into a pocket, and calls the hammer to her hand as the storm inside begins to build.

* * *

Bora grunts, shaking the dark spots from her vision. “Everyone okay?” she asks, pulling herself out of the cockpit. Both Minji and Yoobin nod at her, and she sighs in relief. They’d hit a few things and plowed into the ground pretty hard, but they’d gotten out okay. 

They free themselves and rush out, heading towards the Tower. “Got a plan to get up there?” Yoobin asks, fiddling with her quiver as they run. “Because I don’t think my grappling arrow will reach that far.”

They’re saved from having to answer by the rumble from above. The portal flashes, a brilliant burst of blue rippling across the sky before it opens wide and spits out a worm-like behemoth that lumbers through the air. Armored plates cover it from head to tail, and they open up to release more of the aliens from within.

Minji presses a hand to her earpiece. “Siyeon, are you seeing this?”

“I see it, though I’m not liking it at all. Where’s Gahyeon? Has she shown up yet?”

“Gahyeon?”

“I managed to reach her while I was putting the suit back together. She’s on her way to the city, but I don’t know how long she’ll be. She was close, from what I could tell. If you can hold the ground and keep an eye out for her, I’ll try to get the big one’s attention.”

“On it.” The line drops, and Minji turns to the others. “We take out whatever we can from down here, save as many people as we can, got it?”

“There,” Yoobin points, and she sees civilians trapped in a bus, screaming for help as the aliens close in on them. There are more and more trapped behind them, and Minji tenses as she sees more fliers descending.

“Go,” Bora tells her. “We’ll back you up.”

She hesitates. “Think the two of you can hold them off for a few minutes?”

Yoobin just looks at her, nocks an arrow and fires. It buries itself in the head of a screaming alien. “Go,” she says dryly, and the arrow bursts into a shower of bullets that take the entire group down.

Minji darts forward as the pair open fire behind her. Some shots come her way, but they’re either dodged or reflected by the shield, and she vaults over the bridge and across a bus’s rooftop, eyes fixed on her goal. Meanwhile, Yoobin is working at the bus, lifting children through the windows and forcing the doors open to allow people to escape. Bora’s pistols bark with precise reports, every shot a lethal strike to the head or vitals, and the aliens can’t seem to hit her in return.

Once they're clear, Yoobin darts back to Bora and lays down some cover of her own, loosing arrow after arrow at the masses. “Just like Havana all over again,” the spy grins, tilting her head to avoid a blue blast and putting a round in the shooter’s head. 

“Funny, I don’t remember Havana being quite so chaotic. The tension’s certainly there, though.” Yoobin cycles her quiver and fires an arrow that explodes in the center of a massing group. “About as messy, too.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Havana was fun.”

* * *

Minji hears the commotion behind her, but she keeps running, dodging the blue blasts and taking down any aliens that bar her path. There are civilians everywhere, people screaming in terror, and she wishes she could stop to save them all, but she knows it’s impossible. Beyond them, the police are gathered in an uncoordinated mass, firing wildly at the fliers with their pistols. They’re her best shot at getting people out, so she rushes towards them and leaps over a flaming car to reach the officer who seems most collected.

“Are you the man in charge here?” He nods. “Good. There are civilians everywhere, and these things aren’t letting up. You need to get men in these buildings, clear out as many as you can. The people back the way I came could use the help too. We’re trying to cut them a path, but we need somewhere safe. If you and your men could set up a safe zone from here to 39th, we’ll do what we can to hold the line for you.”

“And why should I listen to you? It’s not a bad call, granted, but we’re holding them here, and we can keep—”

An explosion interrupts him, and Minji turns to see a police car explode into flames and flip over. Four aliens converge on her, and she reacts on instinct. The first two get punched across the face and slammed with the shield, the sound of breaking bone echoing in her ears. The third fires, has its shots blocked and gets promptly decapitated by the shield.

The last growls, aims for the officers, and she rushes for it, severing the gun-wielding arm and caving its head in with the edge of the shield.

The head officer salutes her and walks away quickly, barking orders into his radio. Minji smiles briefly, then starts running back the way she’d come. She trusts Bora and Yoobin to hold their own, but the aliens are still coming, and they’d need all the help they could get.

* * *

Siyeon soars towards the flying behemoth. “Wolf, find me a soft spot on that thing. We need to takeit down, and fast!”

Her HUD goes through a hundred different readouts in seconds, but none of them are helpful, and she groans. “Guess I’m going off instinct again, then.”

She aims for the gaps between the segments on the massive body and fires a cluster of rockets. They explode, covering the creature in smoke, and she wonders whether she’s actually hurt it. Then the smoke clears to reveal scorched, but otherwise unharmed plating, and the creature turns its head to screech at her.

“Well, I got his attention. Wolf, any word on that soft spot?”

“The exterior armour seems impervious to all conventional arms, madam, though your repulsors may be able to penetrate the shell if given sufficient time and intensity.”

“Like I’ll ever get the time for that with everything that’s going on,” she grunts, whirling in the air and slicing a trio of fliers in half with a wrist-mounted laser. She hopes the others are doing better than she is. 

On the ground, unfortunately, the numbers are starting to have an impact. Yoobin’s been forced into close-quarters, using her arrows as improvised stabbing tools and firing shots off whenever she can. An alien tackles her into a taxi, and she grunts at the impact. A brief struggle lets her slip away and stab it in the chest, its partner following seconds later as she recovers an arrow and fires.

Bora dances between targets, striking at every vital she knows with her electrified wrist-weapons. Her guns are empty and she can't spare the time to reload, so she wrestles the gun from the next alien she kills and pulls the trigger, destroying another two in blasts of blue light.

A familiar shield decapitates an alien that has Yoobin in danger, and Minji catches the returning weapon as she leaps into the battle and starts fighting alongside the pair. They clear themselves a space before long, taking the breathing room for what it is. Lightning bursts from the sky, tearing through an advancing squad, and Yoohyeon descends towards them.

“The power surrounding the Tesseract is impenetrable,” she reports, a hand briefly going to her side. “Neither Mjolnir nor the storm has any effect on it.”

“My weapons didn’t affect it either,” Siyeon says, the sound of repulsor fire carrying over her comm. “We need to focus on taking out the masses down here.”

“Alright, what’s your plan, Cap?” Bora asks, reloading her pistols in the brief interim they have. 

“We work together,” Minji replies simply. “We stay as a team, we take out whoever we can in skirmishes. Hopefully Happyface gets here before long and manages to reinforce us, but until then, we treat it as if we’re the first and only line of defense around. If anyone sees Handong, don’t engage her alone, notify the rest of us first.”

“Wait!” Yoohyeon says urgently. “My sister…this situation is not what you believe. Handong is not acting of her own free will!”

“What do you mean?”

“When I fought her atop the Tower…she was hesitating, as if her actions seemed physically painful to her. I was able to reach her for a brief moment before she lost control again.” Even as she speaks, Yoohyeon can see the hesitance in their eyes, and she grimaces. “I—”

“What colour are her eyes?” 

It’s the archer who’s spoken, and the Asgardian finds herself so surprised that she doesn’t answer at first. She would have thought the archer would be the last person to consider the idea. The woman’s eyes narrow, and Yoohyeon realises she hasn’t said anything in response.

“Hazel brown. Handong’s eyes are a warm, hazel brown. They always have been.” The archer draws in a sharp breath and turns to Bora and Minji.

“When I fought Handong, her eyes were blue. The same blue as her sceptre, the same blue that was in my eyes.”

She sees the suspicion fade, replaced with curiosity, worry and realisation, and Yoohyeon sighs in relief. 

“Thank you,” she says. “I have yet to learn your name, archer, but you show great patience and wisdom for one your age.”

“It’s Yoobin,” the archer replies dryly. “Dami or Hawkeye in the field. And you don’t need to thank me; I’ve felt that sceptre, I know what it can do to people. If your sister's really under control, then she’s in the same boat I was. Doesn’t mean I don’t want to hit her for what she did to me, though.”

“That can be arranged,” Bora says. “Yoohyeon, I broke the sceptre’s control over Yoobin by sending her head-first into a metal railing. Once we’re done here, once the Chitauri are dealt with, we can chase Handong down and see if the same trick works there.”

The Asgardian nods gravely. “You may count on my aid for this battle.”

The low purr of an engine rings out, and they all turn to see Gahyeon pulling up on an old motorcycle. “Sorry I’m late,” she says, parking the bike carefully at the side of the road and stretching as she walks over to them. “That thing does not ride well.”

“Good to see you, Gahyeon,” Minji says, and Bora makes a finger heart at the woman as the scientist smiles and returns the gesture. “The feeling’s mutual.”

Minji taps a finger to her comm. “Siyeon, Gahyeon’s here, just like you said! I don’t know what you did to reach her, but I’m glad you did,” she calls, and Bora passes the scientist an earpiece as Siyeon’s voice comes over the line. “That’s news I sorely needed. You may want to ask her to get ready, because we’re about to have company.”

Iron Maiden soars around the skyscraper and flies straight towards them. The flying creature from earlier is close on her trail, screeching and roaring as it tries to catch her. Bora grimaces. “Siyeon, I don’t think I like the company you’ve brought along.”

“Oh, he was uninvited, I assure you.” Gahyeon takes one look at the flying beast, rolls her eyes, and starts walking towards it calmly.

“Gahyeon!” Minji calls, and the scientist turns her head. “Now might be a good time to get angry.” 

The woman grins. “I’ll let you in on a little secret, Minji; I’ve never needed the anger to change.” The green is already showing in her eyes, and her body shifts, bones cracking and shifting as she grows. Her long hair lengthens slightly and gains green highlights, the same color coating the rest of her body as it expands.

And then Gahyeon is gone, and the Hulk roars as she charges the beast head-on and slams her fist into its head. It is the first time Minji has seen the woman’s strength for herself, and she stares in amazement as the single blow crumples its armour and stops the beast’s momentum almost entirely.

The long tail flips into the air, threatening to crash down on them. “Hold on!” Siyeon yells, and fires a missile over their heads. It buries itself in the beast, sections of flesh exposed by the Hulk’s strike, and Minji throws herself in front of the others and covers them with the shield as it explodes.

Giblets of the beast rain down on them, and all the neighbouring Chitauri stop and scream at them. Minji doesn’t need to understand them to know the words can’t be pleasant, and the Hulk drowns their screeching out with a massive roar of her own as she tosses the beast’s remains aside and lumbers over to them. 

They instinctively close ranks, readying their respective weapons. Bora cocks her pistols, Yoobin draws her bow, Yoohyeon’s hammer sparks, Minji shifts her shield, and Siyeon floats down from the sky to take her place in the group, her armour scorched and lightly marked by combat. Fliers assemble in the air before them as they stare down the Chitauri, each of them ready to move at any moment. Handong stands atop the lead one, her green cape billowing in the wind.

“Dreamcatcher, I presume?” she calls out, blue eyes roaming across them. “You look moderately less disorganised than I thought you’d be. Perhaps this won’t be a complete waste of time.”

She flicks her wrist. “Kill them all.”

Time seems to slow as the Chitauri roar, and Dreamcatcher moves. Minji, Bora and Yoobin roll behind a car that offers partial cover, darting in and out with precise strikes and taking shots when they can as gunfire rains down around them. Siyeon and Yoohyeon don’t bother, their armour protecting them from the few stray hits they receive as they blast everything in a wide arc, and the Hulk simply ignores it all to tear through the closest aliens around her.

It takes barely a minute for them to rip through the Chitauri, coating the street in bodies. Handong has been watching the entire affair, blocking stray shots with glowing green shields, but she hasn’t fired a shot. “Impressive,” she says. “Let’s see how you handle the rest.”

She flies away, blocking the shots they fire after her, and the portal booms and ripples as a pair of the flying beasts tear their way out of it.

Despite everything, Minji feels strangely calm. Maybe it’s the fighter in her speaking, but she’s never really known what peacetime is like. She was born into a time when the world was in chaos, and she’d grown up surrounded by fighting. When she went down in the Arctic, she hadn’t been thinking about the consequences. She was one among many, a soldier fighting to save lives, and if she could save more of them by doing this, the choice was an easy one to make.

To wake up after that, and to be told the war was over? Minji hadn’t known what to do. But here, standing among her comrades, her friends? Minji feels almost at home, and she knows exactly how to handle this.

“Until we figure out how to close the portal, our priority is containment. We take out as many as we can, we keep the fight here. Yoobin, I need you on that roof,” she points. “You’re our eyes in the sky; you take out key targets, call out whatever patterns and movements you see. Siyeon, you’ll keep a mobile perimeter. If anything or anyone gets further than three blocks out, you turn them towards the safe zone if they’re friendly or turn them to ash if they’re not.”

Both of them nod, and Yoobin turns to Siyeon. “Could use a lift.”

“Hold on tight, Katniss,” the billionaire says, and she grabs Yoobin by the waist before rocketing into the sky.

“Yoohyeon, we need you to try and bottleneck the portal, take out as many as you can before or as they come in. You’ve got the lightning; light the bastards up.” 

The Asgardian nods grimly. “I will do what I can,” she says, and whirls her hammer briefly before soaring into the air.

Minji turns to Bora. “You and me, we stay on the ground, we take out anyone who makes it down here. And Hulk?”

She turns. “Smash.” The Hulk grins, and Minji thinks she sees Gahyeon’s smirk for a moment as the green behemoth roars and leaps towards the nearest building, pulverising four of the Chitauri in brutal strikes before throwing herself at a squadron of fliers passing by.

“Can’t let ourselves be outdone that easily, can we, Minji?” Bora says, the familiar smirk back on her face as she leaps down to the lower street and starts firing at the stragglers in the area. The shield comes sailing over her head moments later, taking out four before bouncing off an armored helm and back into Minji’s hands. 

“Not a chance,” she grins.

Yoohyeon alights atop the tallest tower she can find. The storm has been surging within her since she’d learned the truth about Handong, and she calls to it now. The sky darkens, her fury adding fuel to the fire, and thunder cracks as a bolt of lightning crashes down from the sky and surges through her, Mjolnir humming in her hands.

The sooner they are done with this, the sooner she can help her sister.

A battlecry leaves her lips as she lets the lightning go, directing it in enormous, arcing streaks that lance through everything in their path. It strikes the portal, and Yoohyeon allows herself a savage grin as she sees a pair of the giant beasts screech and falter under the assault.

* * *

They’re ten minutes out, and Joowon is barking orders and making sure the Helicarrier is fully prepared for battle when Park comes rushing up to him.

“Sir,” she pants, “the World Security Council is on the line.”  


Joowon grimaces. He’d never liked dealing with them; they were far too trigger-happy for his tastes, too happy to sacrifice others, and if he was the one thinking that, you knew they were bad.

Still, they were his direct superiors, and he schools his face into a practiced impassiveness as he motions for Park to put them on.

* * *

“Siyeon, you have a lot of them on your tail,” Yoobin notes, firing an arrow into a squadron leader’s head. “What did you do to them before we got here? They really don’t like you.”

“Probably jealous of my superior taste in fashion,” the woman snarks. “If they’re on me, then they’re not going after the people, so I’ll take that as a win. Armaments aren’t going to last if I keep using them like this, though.”

The archer’s eyes narrow as she spots a group trying to turn, and the exploding arrow she puts into the center of them takes out the entire unit. “Well, they can’t bank worth a damn. Find a tight corner and take them all out at once. I’ll give you some cover.”

“Swinging around.” Yoobin sees the Iron Maiden heading towards her and pulls a specific arrow from her quiver. Siyeon soars overhead, and she tracks them steadily, waiting for the right moment.

She fires, and her shot burns through the leader’s vehicle like butter. It falls screaming to its death, and Siyeon immediately turns and takes out two with her repulsors during the distraction. She puts a burst into her thrusters, takes the next turn steeply and as dangerously as she can.

An explosion sounds behind her, and she sees a trail of red contacts fade from her HUD. “Good call. I’m going to keep them moving like this, see if I can’t support you all around the city. Anyone need a hand?”

“Well, Yoohyeon’s taking down a squadron on 6th.”

Siyeon pouts. “And she didn’t invite me? How rude.”

* * *

She’s never given control to the Hulk willingly before, and the experience is…odd, to say the least.

Normally, she’s completely unaware; after the pain of transformation, it feels like a restless sleep to her. She gets vague impressions sometimes, pain and anger and heat and wind, and then she’ll wake up god-knows-how-many-days later in a field with nothing but the clothes on her back(if she’s lucky).

This time, it’s like she’s watching from behind the eyes, aware but not in control. A presence presses against her, and she almost recoils at the sheer strength of it; it’s almost raw emotion incarnate. She feels anger and rage pouring off it, but also a strange protectiveness and a small sliver of what she can only describe as contentment.

_This must be the Hulk_, she realises, and the presence seems to nudge her as she does so.

She sees one of the flying leviathans bearing down on a skyscraper, and her heart jumps. _“There’s people inside! Help them!”_

She feels the Hulk grunt and leap towards the building, tearing through the windows on the other side. Gahyeon winces as she feels them smash through desks and glass and chairs, people screaming and moving to get out of their way as they charge.

_“Away,”_ the Hulk thinks, the simple word echoing through Gahyeon’s mind as the Leviathan comes into view, and they leap. Powerful arms find holds on the segmented armour, and Gahyeon feels them strain to pull the creature away. Something tears loose and they almost lose their grasp, but they adjust and keep pulling. 

Part of the building crumbles as a fin smashes into the side, but it stays standing as they drag it away, and Gahyeon sighs in relief. _“Thank you.”_

She feels a brief tingle of acknowledgement, and a question pushes its way to the fore. _“Smash?”_

The Hulk has never answered her before, never really listened to her before. Then again, she’s never tried anything like this, so maybe this could have been the norm. Maybe this could still be the norm. _“Yes,” _she thinks quickly. _“Smash!”_

The Hulk roars in satisfaction, tearing into the creature, and Gahyeon smiles as the Leviathan roars in pain and starts trying to throw them off.

* * *

Bora swears as her pistols run dry for the umpteenth time and a Chitauri charges her. Similar vitals to humans or not, the creature is inhumanly strong, and she feels her injured ribs protest as she’s slammed into a car.

It tries to slam the bladed edge of its rifle down, but she throws herself to the side and jams her wrist-weapons into the back of its neck. It screeches, faltering as the electricity courses through it, and she yanks the weapon free and fires. It drops, and she whirls, sensing movement behind her. 

She almost fires before she realises it’s Minji, and she sags in relief as the adrenaline ebbs.

Minji vaults over her head and blocks a shot, taking out the shooter with a precise throw. “You okay?” she asks, catching the returning weapon.

“Yeah,” she pants, leaning heavily on her borrowed rifle. “But Minji…none of this will mean anything if we can’t get that portal closed. How many of them have we taken down by now? Hundreds? Thousands?”

“Our biggest guns couldn’t touch it.”

“Sometimes it’s not brute force that matters. Sometimes you need a little pressure at the right time and place, and that’s all it takes to bring something crumbling down.”

Minji looks torn for a second, then nods. “Good luck. You’re going to need a ride to get up there, though.”  


Bora’s gaze shifts to the fliers passing overhead. “Oh, I’ve got a few ideas in mind. I could use a boost, though.” The soldier gets into position. “You sure about this?”

“It’ll be fun. And if I don’t do it, we’re going to lose. It’ll be slow and bloody, but we’ll lose.”

She runs forward, feels Minji tense and throw her up, and she catches a passing flier as it goes by. Minji watches until she sees Bora clamber up and take the pilots out. “Siyeon, Yoobin, check your fire; Bora’s going to try and find a way to shut down the portal, and she’s borrowed one of their fliers to do it. Keep her covered if you can.”

“On it,” they say simultaneously.

* * *

Siyeon turns the second she hears the order and opens a private line to Bora. “Bora, where are you?”

“…...Avenue,” the spy answers, static blocking the first part of the name, and Siyeon locks on to her signal and soars towards her. She sees the woman before long and blasts every flier on her trail down with a flurry of repulsor blasts. They go down easily, far too easily, and she grimaces at the thought of trusting Bora’s safety to one of them.

But in a warzone like this, she doesn’t have much choice, and she growls to herself as she rockets down towards the street. They fold like paper before the suit, and she tears through dozens of them as they converge on Minji. 

“Siyeon!” Minji yells, angling her shield, and she fires a continuous beam that the soldier redirects against the crowd. 

She’s clear for at least a few seconds, and Siyeon flies upwards again, taking some of the heat off Yoobin as they swarm her building. Yoobin stabs one in the head with an arrow as it tries to claw her, ducks under an aerial barrage and takes out the shooter in return.

Three streets down, Yoohyeon and the Hulk are battling atop a Leviathan, smashing aside the many troopers trying to swarm them as they work to take the beast down. A piece of its armour comes loose on the side, and the Hulk tears it off and stabs the jagged piece deep into its back.

Yoohyeon’s hammer slams down moments later, and the Leviathan gives a final screech as it sinks and plunges into a station. They emerge from the wreckage, standing shoulder to shoulder for a second.

Gahyeon catches the thought too late, and she winces as the Hulk punches Yoohyeon through the side of the station. _“She’s on our side, remember?”_

_“Long fall,” _the Hulk snorts in return, and Gahyeon sighs. _“Time and place. Time and place.”_

* * *

They fight hard, but the Chitauri keep coming, and the numbers are starting to tell. Even with the Serum, Minji feels tired in a way she hasn’t felt in years, not since the most desperate days of the war. One of the Chitauri manages to break her guard, and she’s knocked to the ground briefly. A stab comes dangerously close, and she turns, gets it in a headlock and twists.

The alien drops, its neck twisted at an unnatural angle, and she stumbles to her feet as Yoobin’s voice sounds in her ear. “Minji, there’s a bank on 42nd, just off Madison. The Chitauri have cornered a lot of civilians in there. You’re the closest one.”

“I’m on it,” she pants, stopping only to retrieve her shield before she starts running.

Getting inside the bank is far easier than she’d thought; a bus has been thrown against the side of the building, giving her an easy way up, and she uses it as a springboard to leap and roll through the window. 

Three Chitauri turn to her as she rolls in, and she throws the shield, knocking one of them to the floor and rolling behind a table as the others fire.

Blue blasts strike the ground around her, and she kicks the table forward. One dodges, but the other gets pinned against the railings, and Minji rushes forward, grabs its neck and twists. She catches sight of the people in her peripherals as she tosses the body aside—there are easily dozens of them, maybe even a hundred, and the distraction costs her.

Grey arms wrap around her neck, catching her in the same hold she’d used moments ago, and she struggles to break free as the alien she’d knocked down gets to its feet and growls. It hefts a rifle, and Minji throws all her weight into a flip, reversing hers and her captor’s positions as it fires.

The alien screams as the blue blasts tear through its chest, and Minji turns to the last. It scrambles away, reaching for a rapidly beeping blue box on the ground, and her mind flashes back to the final days of the war, to the similar devices that MINX used to wipe out whole squads.

Her eyes widen, and she dives for the shield, balling up behind it as the Chitauri screams defiantly and throws it at her.

The blast blows her out of the window, and she grunts as she lands chest first onto a car with enough force to crush the hood beneath her.

For a moment, she lies there, tense and stunned, the world moving in a dreamlike daze. Her gaze falls to the building. It’s intact, thankfully, and she sees emergency services running in, getting people out and ushering them towards the safe zone. 

One woman shoots her a grateful smile as she’s ushered out, and Minji groans as she shakes off the blast. She can’t rest yet. If she stops now, she’s dead, and a lot more people will follow.

* * *

Joowon gives the council an incredulous look. “Are you kidding me?” 

“Director, the council has made a decision,” Hawley says, and he snarls, putting as much anger into his glare as he can. “I recognise that the council has made a decision, but given that it’s a stupid-ass decision, I have elected to ignore it.”

Malick gives him a pointed look. “Director. You’re closer than any of our subs. You scramble that jet, and—”

“That is the island of Manhattan, Councilman! Until I’m certain my team can’t hold it, I will not order a nuclear strike against a civilian populace!”

“There are always casualties in war,” Malick says. “If we don’t hold them here, we lose everything!”

Joowon stares them down, his voice dripping with contempt. “If I send that bird out, we already have.”

He motions, and Park kills the feed. “You heard all that, Park?”

Her voice hardens. “I did. I’ll lock down all our nuclear ordinance, sir. No one’s getting off this ship without us knowing about it.”

* * *

A blue blast whizzes dangerously close to Bora’s head, and she turns at the familiar sound. Handong’s horned helmet is a dead giveaway, and she taps a hand to her earpiece as she does her best to evade. “Handong’s on my tail. If any of you are nearby, I could use a hand.”

“_Fuck_, I’m on the other side of the city,” Siyeon growls, and Bora sees a distant explosion go off. “I’ll try, Bora, but I’m a ways.”

Yoobin’s calm voice enters her ear. “I’ve got you. Swing by, line her up for me.”

She banks the craft left, wincing as a shot tears part of the rear stand away. “Make it quick, please.”

Yoobin breathes deeply, cycling her quiver. The arrow comes to hand, and she draws back smoothly, picking out Bora’s small form and the approaching figure behind her. “I got her,” she mutters, and releases.

It sails straight for Handong’s head, but the woman turns impossibly quickly and snatches it from the air. She gives the archer a dry look, lifting the arrow pointedly.

Yoobin just smirks. When Handong looks back at the arrow, it’s beeping, and she has just enough time to sigh before it explodes in her face. The blast devastates her flier and knocks her onto the penthouse floor, her helmet coming loose on impact.

“Ouch,” she mutters, brushing the glass from her form as she stands. A deafening roar is the only warning she gets before a massive form tackles her through the penthouse windows. Handong hits the back wall hard enough to crack it, and she groans as the Hulk stands before her.

“Look, we both know how this is going to go. I’m a goddess with magical powers, you’re a monster good for little more than smashing. So why don’t we—”

The Hulk grabs her leg without warning and starts smashing her into the floor. Her instinctive shield cracks within seconds, the incredible force of each blow hammering down until she can barely think, let alone muster the focus needed for her magic. Something shatters in her mind, her barrier failing moments later, and then Handong just knows pain as she’s battered and beaten like never before.

By the time the Hulk releases her, her body’s gone numb and unresponsive, a deep, throbbing ache warning her against trying to move. 

“Puny goddess,” the beast snorts, and leaves her lying in the rubble.

* * *

Her flier starts sparking as she reaches the top of the Tower, and Bora bails out, rolling to dissipate the force of the fall. The generator lies before her, its blue shield still in place.

“The sceptre,” a voice says weakly, and she turns to see Sunmi lying against the air vents, nursing a head wound that’s bleeding freely. “Handong’s sceptre…the Tesseract can’t fight, but you can’t protect against yourself. It was…horrible.”

“It’s not your fault,” Bora says, quickly glancing at her eyes. Not the slightest trace of blue. “You didn’t know what you were doing.”

Sunmi pauses. “Actually, I think I did. I could see myself working, and while I couldn’t stop it, Handong was quite broad with her commands. I think I managed to build in a safety net. A failsafe that could cut the Tesseract off.”

“The sceptre?”

The scientist nods and casts her gaze downwards to the penthouse floor. “It might give you a way to close the portal. And unless I’m mistaken, it’s just lying there, ready for the taking.”

* * *

It’s always the unexpected things that catch you off-guard in battle. Yoohyeon’s embattled with a number of fliers when the skyscraper beside her shudders and a Leviathan comes roaring through it. The beast hits her at full speed and knocks her down into the street.

She grunts, more annoyed than injured, and she’s about to soar back into the fray when the earpiece she’d received at the start of the battle chimes. “Yoohyeon, I’ll handle the big one!” Siyeonsays. “Go help Minji; there’s a lot of them coming her way, and my bigger guns ran dry a while ago!”

“As you wish,” Yoohyeon responds, and takes off at full speed towards the spot she’d last seen the soldier.

Siyeon sees her go and alters her flight path to take her along the Leviathan. Her repulsors do nothing to the beast, so she tries the lasers that had been so effective in the past.

“Madam, we will lose power before we manage to penetrate that shell,” Wolf informs her, and she growls in frustration as she retracts the weapon. Her missiles have long since run out, her armaments nearly exhausted. All she has left are her lasers, repulsors and fists, and none of them will do her any good against this thing.

“Soft spots?”

“The Leviathan’s hide is impervious to a great number of things, and it leaves very little of the beast exposed. With the exception of its eyes, the beast’s vitals are difficult to assail from your current position.”

Vitals? A thought strikes her. “Wolf, how do you feel about diving into the belly of the beast?”

“I wouldn’t typically suggest it,” the A.I says dryly, “but I suspect you’ll do it anyway.”

“Kinda out of options here,” she responds, and the suit’s control surfaces shift so she’s got spikes and blades to work with. She banks, flies straight towards the beast, and when it opens its mouth to roar, she flies inside, shooting and stabbing and tearing at it with everything she has.

It convulses and explodes without warning, and the blast sends her flying into the street. The impact dazes her, blood running down her head from where it had smashed against the helmet, and she’s barely managed to stand when an alien blast strikes her in the chest.

Things are little better elsewhere.

Yoobin reaches for an arrow as an alien reaches the roof, finds her quiver empty and curses as she’s forced to duel in close-quarters. She disarms her attacker quickly and kicks it off the side of the building, but there’s a squadron of them massing and flying towards her.

She pulls an arrow free from a nearby corpse, loads the last arrowhead in her quiver and leaps.

The angle’s not good, the shot even less so, but it connects, and she swings on it desperately and braces as she heads for a window. It breaks on impact, and she grimaces as she lands hard, driving several fragments through her skin.

Gahyeon sees Yoobin forced to abandon her point and urges the Hulk towards it. She listens, battering a path through the aliens to try and reach the archer, but they’re massing in the skies above.

Hundreds of blue blasts rain down on them, and both she and the Hulk roar in pain. They don’t break the skin, but they _hurt_, and while they’re resisting, adapting, the force behind the volley pounds them deep into the ground.

Her consciousness starts being pushed away, the Hulk’s presence shifting to encompass her own, and the last thing Gahyeon hears is the Hulk’s defiant roar before her awareness fades entirely. 

* * *

“We’ll be in range within minutes, sir!” a technician reports, and Joowon nods. “Step on it, we’re already late to this party.”  


An alarm blares out, and Park swears as she turns to her readouts. “Sir, we have a rogue bird in motion! All hands, we have a rogue bird in motion, takeoff is not authorised, repeat, takeoff is not authorised!”

Joowon doesn’t wait. He runs for the outer deck, grabbing an RPG on the way.

The wind tears at his clothes and stings, but he forces himself to steady, tracking the rogue jet carefully. He fires, and the missile takes out the plane’s wing and sends it careening to a halt just before it can fall off the Helicarrier entirely.

For a moment, he feels relief, and then he sees a second one shoot past him. He draws his pistol and aims, but it’s already too far, and the few shots he tries go wide.

“Park, can we shoot that bird down?”

“Negative!” she responds agitatedly. “Someone’s overridden weapon control, and even if we launch another bird after them, it won’t catch them in time to stop the launch.”

“Goddamned Council,” he growls, and opens a line to the last shot he has. “Siyeon, do you read me?! You have a nuke headed straight for the city!”

The Chitauri are swarming her, battering at the downed suit, and Siyeon’s doing her best to fight them off when Joowon contacts her. “You must be joking.”

A bayonet slams into her helmet, and she grunts as the impact rocks her. “How long?”

“Three minutes. If it hits, it’ll wipe New York and everyone in it off the map.”

She swears, blasting a pair of attackers off her. “Wolf, put everything we’ve got into the thrusters,” she orders, the suit humming with power before the sentence completely leaves her mouth. 

“I may hate you, Joowon, but your bosses are way worse. Give them hell for this, will you?”

“Gladly,” he growls in return.

* * *

Shield, punch, dodge, roll, block. Minji’s been on autopilot for the last few minutes, her mind and body close to their limit. Yoohyeon’s timely arrival helped turn the tides, but she can only fight her own fatigue for so long. 

Something has to give. She reacts a hairsbreadth too slow, her shield too low to block, and a blue blast pierces through her side. She drops to the ground, hissing in pain, and Yoohyeon immediately moves to cover her, smashing a car into her attackers and throwing her hammer at the more distant enemies.

“Are you okay?” the Asgardian asks urgently, pulling her to her feet. 

“Yeah,” Minji grunts, inspecting her wound. It’s a clean hit, thankfully, in and out, and the wound isn’t a large one. Still, it’s one more thing to slow her down.

Her earpiece crackles. “Can anyone hear me? This is Bora — I’m with Sunmi at the generator, and I think I can shut the portal down. Does anyone copy?”

“We’re here!” Minji yells. “Do it!”

“No, wait!” Siyeon’s desperate voice comes through moments later. “I’ve got a nuke coming in that’s going to blow in less than a minute. Can’t disable it, don’t have the time, but there’s one obvious place to put it.”

Multiple curses come over the line. “We’ll buy you some time.”

Siyeon sees the nuke in her HUD as she shoots over the bay and throws herself into reverse as it soars past her. She redlines the thrusters, pushing herself harder and harder until she’s outspeeding the missile. 

Her gauntlets make contact, and she positions herself underneath it, straining to apply pressure.

Wolf’s voice chimes in her ear. “Madam, we have an issue. The missile’s guidance system is still functional, and we cannot disable it as we are without detonating the ordinance in the process. You’ll—”

“I know.” She triggers her comm. “Joowon, do you have a way to disable the missile’s guidance system?”

“Negative,” the man reports grimly. “We’re trying to hack it now, but everything’s been overridden.”

She closes her eyes. “Only one thing for it, then.”

“Madam? Shall I call your sister?” Wolf asks quietly. 

She doesn’t trust her voice, so she just nods. The number connects within moments, and her sister’s panicked voice answers. “Hello? Siyeon, what’s happening? I’m watching the news, but it’s just chaos; there’s shooting everywhere, aliens running around….are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Siyeon mutters, her voice choking slightly. “Listen…there’s a chance I might not make it back from this. Someone fired a nuke towards the city, and I’ve got to ride it into the portal manually.”

There’s silence over the line for a long, long moment, and then her sister speaks. “You’re not dying,” she says firmly. “You’ll find a way, I know you.”

She sighs. “Unnie, I can’t promise—”

“You’ll find a way,” her sister repeats desperately, and Siyeon can hear the tears in her voice. “I thought I’d lost you in Afghanistan, and you survived that. You can survive this too. Please.”

The devastation in her voice is more than she can bear, and Siyeon closes her eyes for a second. “Wolf. If we drop thruster output just enough to keep hold of the missile, will we still have the power to fly when we cross the threshold?”  


“Yes, Madam. But it won’t last long. Seconds, maybe. Enough for a short burst or two.”

It’s a chance. “I’ll do my best, unnie,” she says, and hears her sister sniff.

“You’d better. You’ve still got my concert to come to, and you’ve never missed one before. I expect you front and center when I walk onto that stage.”

Siyeon chuckles, ignoring the tears that threaten her own eyes. “See you then.”

* * *

The Tower’s vantage means Bora gets the first view of Siyeon as the Iron Maiden comes rocketing towards her, straining to push the missile off-course. Something doesn’t sit right with her about it, and it takes her scattered brain a few moments to realise the issue.

“Siyeon?” she says urgently, triggering her comm. “Please tell me you managed to disable its guidance system.”

A heavy sigh answers her. “No time. I’ll need to ride it in. If I don’t, then we risk New York becoming ground zero for one of the worst mass-murders in history.”

“There must be something we can do. Maybe Yoohyeon can short it out, or—”

Minji desperately wants to say otherwise, wants to hope Siyeon can make it, but she knows the tone in the woman’s voice. It’s the same one she had when she’d made the choice to stay with the plane all those years ago, to bring it down in the Arctic regardless of the cost to herself.

“Siyeon, I won’t try to stop you, but is there anything we can do?” she asks. “Anything at all?”

“Yeah. Keep that portal open for me. I’ll try to drop the nuke and come back through as soon as I’m sure it’s clear. But you can’t let the blast reach the city; if I’m not back through in five seconds, shut it. No matter what.”

“I….” Bora clears her throat, her voice more stricken than they’ve ever heard it. “I copy,” she says quietly. “You’d better come back to me, Singnie. I’m not ready to lose another person I care about.”

Siyeon chuckles quietly, adjusting her grip as the portal draws closer. “See you soon,” she says over the comm, and then the portal swallows her and the nuke whole.

* * *

Being on the other side is an odd experience, to say the least, and Siyeon suspects she’d be more curious about it all if the situation were any different.

She sees the massive army flooding the space, sees aliens stretching further than her scanners can reach. At the center of it all is a massive mothership, and she turns the nuke slightly, aiming it towards that.

She lets go and starts speeding back towards the portal as system warnings blare in her ears, a counter warning her of imminent power failure in five seconds. Siyeon reroutes as much power from the reactor as she dares, does everything she can to keep the suit running just a little longer.

_Eight seconds. _

The world around her lights up briefly, and she knows the nuke’s gone off. 

_Five seconds. _

Her thruster pack falters, its energy finally spent, but the portal’s close, so close, and she tucks her arms in, willing the suit to go faster, further.

_Three seconds. _

Her deadline’s up.

* * *

When the Chitauri start sagging and falling over like puppets whose strings have been cut, they know Siyeon’s done it, and they wait anxiously for the woman to come soaring back through the portal. “Come on, Singnie, come on,” Bora mutters quietly, looking for the flash of red and gold.

Minji’s throat tightens, bitterness rising in her chest as she counts down the seconds. She doesn’t want to do this, doesn’t want to be the one who gives the order. But Siyeon doesn’t appear, and at the five-second mark, she raises a hand to her comm. 

“Close it,” she says quietly. “It’s what she wanted.”

Bora doesn’t respond, but the blue beam atop the Tower falters, and the portal starts shrinking in on itself with alarming speed. None of them take their eyes off it, unwilling to give up on their friend.

* * *

_One second._

The suit goes dark just as she reaches the threshold, and she closes her eyes.

* * *

The portal collapses in on itself with a final, deafening crack, and the shockwave ripples across the sky.

They’ve won, but it doesn’t feel like a victory to her. Bora’s eyes burn with a feeling she hasn’t felt in years, and she pushes it away, using her training to bury it deep. She can cry later; she _will_ cry later, but she can’t afford it now. 

“She did it!” There’s a joy in Minji’s voice that she can’t understand, and the spy almost snaps at her before she catches the flash of red and gold in her peripherals. The small form of Iron Maiden plummets from the sky, and Bora shakes her head and opens the private channel. “You always keep your promises, Singnie,” she smiles. “I should have known better.”

But Siyeon doesn’t answer her, the comm channel remaining eerily silent, and a terrifying dread grows in her heart as she looks closer. There’s no light from the suit, no familiar whine, no thrust. Just the whistling sound of the suit plummeting through the air.

“The suit’s gone dark, and she’s not slowing down!” Bora yells, a hand pressed to her comm, and she hears shouts of alarm from below and the whirl of Yoohyeon’s hammer.

A thunderous roar rings out as Siyeon falls past the Tower, and she sees a green flash as the Hulk leaps from nowhere and snatches her from the air. Bora watches the Hulk shift as they fall, hugging Siyeon tightly to her chest and moving so they’re falling back first.

Then they pass from view, and she hears the thud of the impact. All she can do now is wait and hope, and she curses her lack of flight for an instant; she has no way to get down there.

She hears scuffling, the clank of metal, rough compressions. Thunder booms, and she hears the slight fizzle and pop of lightning. _Yoohyeon must be trying to restart the suit. Although…considering the long fall and an average person’s tolerance for g-forces…it could be to restart her heart as well._

It’s the cold, analytical part of her that assesses the situation, and Bora grits her teeth against the thought and does her best to push it away as she hears the clink of the hammer.

She hears the popping once, twice, thrice. Then her comm crackles, and Minji’s tired voice comes over it. “She’s not breathing,” the soldier reports grimly. 

_No. _Her fists clench. _No._

The Hulk roars, her bellow filled with grief and anguish, and Bora feels the beginnings of tears at her eyes. 

Then she hears a cough and the low whir of machinery. “What hit me?” Siyeon groans, rubbing her head wearily. “I remember going through the portal and…oh. Please tell me no one kissed me. Or at least tell me it wasn’t Minji, because that would be awkward.”

Another roar rings out, the sound one of joy rather than loss and sorrow, and Bora closes her eyes in relief and smiles before she touches a hand to the comm again. “Could one of you pick me up? Because I can’t fly, and I am _not _trusting the elevators after everything the Tower’s taken.”

“Hulk coming. Hulk left stick-lady up there.” 

* * *

Handong doesn’t think she’s ever felt so battered in her life.

She heals faster than the mortals, she knows, but it doesn’t feel that way right now. Everything aches, and she's sure she's broken something.  Her shoulder protests again as she drags herself closer to the steps, and she sags as the movement sends pain rocketing through her body.

_At least I’m free of his control._

It is the one thing she’s grateful for from this whole situation.

Mjolnir’s familiar sound catches her ear, and she sighs. _Time to face the music, I suppose._ When she turns, Dreamcatcher is standing before her, some looking quite the worse for wear. Each of them sports cuts and bruises alongside their own unique wounds from battle. 

Yoohyeon has come out mostly unscathed, but Handong winces when her gaze falls to the bloodstained area on her side. The movement doesn’t go unnoticed. “It was only a scratch, sister,” Yoohyeon says gently, dropping Mjolnir to the floor and leaning down. “Besides, you appear to have fared far worse than I.”

“Being thrown around by something much stronger than you are tends to do that to you, yes,” she chuckles. The Hulk grunts at her, and she winces. “Some**one**, sorry. I owe you for breaking me free from his grasp.”

That earns her a nod, and she turns to look at the archer. “Archer, I owe you an apology as well. I do not expect your forgiveness, nor do I deserve it. A mind is sacred, and while I was not in control of myself, it was still I who invaded yours.”

“Appreciated,” the archer nods simply. “And it’s Dami, by the way.”

The woman offers her a smile, and she returns it briefly before wincing as her injuries flare up again. Yoohyeon instinctively reaches out, cradling her against her chest, and while a flicker of embarrassment wells up in Handong’s heart, the comfort and relief she feels at the gesture outstrips it by far.

“Handong…how did you come to be under the control of another?” her sister asks quietly, and Handong sighs. 

“Is that drink still on the table? Because this is going to be a long story, and you may not like what you hear.”

* * *

It takes Yoohyeon the better part of an hour to calm down, and there are still storm clouds crackling over the Tower by the time Siyeon makes her suggestion.

“Stay with me.”

Handong blinks. “What?”

“Stay with me,” she repeats. “It’s the most logical thing to do. You can’t go back to Asgard, since by all accounts, your dear old dad will punish you hard for this, and if the mythology is even half correct about him, then we’re not letting that happen.”

Yoohyeon’s growl and the slight flinch Handong makes are all the confirmation Siyeon needs, and she presses on. “So you stay with me. Gahyeon’s coming with me as well, and I can probably convince the others to come along as well. We’ll keep you safe. We’ll make sure he can’t get his hands on you. Let Yoohyeon take the Tesseract back to him and explain your disappearance away, and then she can come straight back.”

“I…” Handong is uncharacteristically silent, and Siyeon grins. “Good to know I can still have that effect on gods. I mean it, Handong. You’ve done a lot of bad and you’ll have to pay for some of it, but it wasn’t all your fault. Yoohyeon’s vouched for you, and we protect our own.”

“I…..thank you.” The Asgardian dips her head. “I will pay whatever restitutions you deem appropriate, and your offer of hospitality is greatly appreciated.”

“You have my thanks as well, Siyeon,” Yoohyeon says, dipping her head in gratitude as she picks up the Tesseract. “I will be back as swiftly as I can.” The Tesseract shimmers brilliantly as she steps outside, and the thunder goddess disappears in a beam of rainbow-hued light. 

Siyeon turns around, inspecting the damage done to the penthouse, and sighs. “I don’t suppose any of you would be willing to help clean the place up a bit, would you?”

The Hulk laughs heartily and starts to shrink, leaving a confused Gahyeon in her place. This time, her shirt hasn’t been lucky enough to survive the chaos, and Handong quickly hands the woman her cape.

“Thanks,” she mutters, wrapping it around herself with a light blush. “How did you get me to change back, by the way?”

“We didn’t.”

“Then how…” Gahyeon pouts. “Oh, you can’t be serious. Did she really turn back just to leave me with the cleanup? It’s your mess too!” she scowls.

It’s Minji who cracks first, her giggling proving infectious, and the penthouse soon rings with their laughter.

* * *

“That should do it,” Director Joowon mutters, waving the screen away.

He might not be able to go against the council directly, but even they had people to answer to, and a whispered word here and there was all he needed to set the ball in motion. Before long, they’d be answering for their actions, and he allows himself a small grin at the thought.

“Sir?”

“Yes, Agent Park?”  


“Aren’t you worried about what will happen once they realise what you’ve done?” 

He chuckles. “Oh, I don’t doubt I’ll receive some form of reprimand. But they crossed the line far more than I did, and I suspect I’ll get away with a slap on the wrist in comparison. Especially with the success of the Initiative.”

“About that…” She sounds uncomfortable, fidgeting slightly from toe to toe, and he raises an eyebrow. “You can speak freely, Park.”

“How can you be sure of that? How do you know they’ll listen or haven’t just gone their separate ways after everything that’s happened? They’re dangerous.”

“That they are. And now the whole world knows it. **Every** world knows it.” 

He sees the light dawning in Park’s eyes and chuckles as he brings up a screen. “As for going their separate ways…I don’t think we need to worry about that.”

He turns the screen. The Tower is already undergoing reconstruction efforts, paint pots and ladders and replacement parts scattered across the penthouse, and if he strains his eye, he thinks he can pick out the small forms sorting through the damage. But what he sees first; what everyone will see first, is the new logo adorning the top of the building.

It’s not the familiar sign of Lee Industries. It’s a symbol that’s been burned into his mind for decades, and the Director smiles as he looks at the stylised dreamcatcher.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's finally here(and not before time)! Apologies for the long wait- life is fairly busy at the moment, and I'll actually be getting on a flight tomorrow, but I wanted to finish this before anything else happened. Especially since I've finished Daydream already. If I'm honest, there's a lot wrong with Take the Stage, but it'll always hold a place in my heart as my first fic, and it seems like people have still managed to enjoy it in spite of its failings. 
> 
> To those who've left kudos and/or commented, you have my thanks, and I hope you've enjoyed the ride!

**Author's Note:**

> Well, this was the start of my attempt to introduce the members - I've largely followed the events of the film, doing what I can to transfer their personalities across, and I'm hoping to post the remaining chapters over the next week, depending on how long it takes me to finish and edit them.


End file.
